I'm always annoyed when Dev's call a trailer "Gameplay" and it's just inside the game footage. No actual gameplay, not explanation, no highlight of what's new or changed. I'm still excited for the...
I'm always annoyed when Dev's call a trailer "Gameplay" and it's just inside the game footage. No actual gameplay, not explanation, no highlight of what's new or changed. I'm still excited for the game, but this didn't offer much of anything but a bit more hype, there are literally no details about the game that get revealed.
It is a little redundant, but it is kinda the trailer for the gameplay showcase they just released which does actually talk about the gameplay at a high level direction perspective. Also a (some?)...
Exemplary
It is a little redundant, but it is kinda the trailer for the gameplay showcase they just released which does actually talk about the gameplay at a high level direction perspective.
I just stumbled across this last night, thanks for sharing though, I am really excited after watching that gameplay. The verticality of the maps is really interesting and I love that they changed...
I just stumbled across this last night, thanks for sharing though, I am really excited after watching that gameplay. The verticality of the maps is really interesting and I love that they changed queue management and development.
Firaxis has a ton of stuff still under wraps, and they've got until February before they lock the ruleset and release. So who knows what'll change. But what they've hinted or revealed right now...
Exemplary
Firaxis has a ton of stuff still under wraps, and they've got until February before they lock the ruleset and release. So who knows what'll change. But what they've hinted or revealed right now isn't exactly all sunshine and roses.
I've been playing Civilization since I. Literally thousands and thousands of hours in the franchise's various iterations. III was a very dark time, for a number of reasons which look like they might be relevant to what's being indicated in VII.
One of the biggest strategic balancing factors in Civilization has always been "Tall v Wide." Tall is generally defined as fewer but more powerful cities, while wide was more cities (which might or might not equal the power of Tall). The game's rules, since dev teams have come in after Sid and started "putting their stamp" on the franchise have constantly waged wars back and forth across this divide. Devs who hate wide always structure the rules to support Tall, and so on.
VII has very clearly declared for Tall again. There's a hard cap on how many cities a civ can have. At least in the 1st Age of VII gameplay, it's a handful; comments from players invited to the junket indicated the starting cap was three and had only risen to seven or nine by the end of that age after advancements were factored). One of the big gameplay issues with III was how to "max out" your civ by settling your "allowed" cities while also needing to balance conquest.
Civ was one of the original 4X games. EXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate. Each of those Xs pretty much means, sooner or later, you're fighting against other civs. When you fight in Civ, you're fighting over cities at the end of the day. V and then VI tried to make the map very tactical (compared to Doom Stacks which felt more strategic in I and II and even III and IV), but it's mostly just a sideshow, those "tactical" battles on the map. Since their meaning and result collapses back down to which cities are threatened and then captured militarily.
And the same III issue of "I'm capped, but now I've just captured new cities" was mentioned in commentary from the press junket all this current VII information is coming from. People who had capped their empires, and then acquired other cities, and were being penalized for it. Because that's what the cap ultimately does; penalizes you for having more cities. III had some very harsh penalties, and the ruleset made it abundantly clear you were not supposed to go above the cap for any reason.
How harsh are VII's? Well, we don't know quite know yet because this was a press junket. None of the participants were allowed to get footage or images independently to show us; they were all given a packet of information. They were only allowed to play the first (of three) ages in the game, and of course rules and development are still in flux.
But there is a cap, and you apparently do have to "figure out" what to do with conquests once more. Under old civ rules, destroying a city was treated by the AI as a horrific thing. Which was one of the problems with III. You'd capture a city, but couldn't really keep it since doing so not only didn't get you any advantage, it would hurt your other cities by doing so since the rules penalized your entire empire for being over the cap. So you'd have to destroy it, but that'd black mark you forever as a war criminal.
Catch-22, very not fun to play against. Especially since, if you give it back, the AI would probably just declare war on you all over again for pretty much the same reasons as before. So you would be trapped in these loops as the game progressed, where it's like "oh, the Romans rebuilt their army and want war again; guess it's time to once more capture half their empire before I wag my finger at them admonishingly and give it all back; see you guys in two hundred more years when we have to repeat the exercise for the fourth time."
Along with city cap, the age system. Firaxis apparently "has data" that indicates a very high number of Civ games don't finish. There are a lot of reasons for this, but mostly the "positive" reason basically boils down to snowballing.
If you're losing, you usually just start another game and try again. If you're winning, some players find it boring and start again for that reason. They "snowballed" their civ's power to the point where they pretty much knew without question they'd won, but it would take more gameplay to "make the victory official."
Firaxis has concluded this is bad. And has decided to introduce a three Age system to combat it (Antiquity, Exploration, Modern). Each player has to clear certain gameplay bars, conditions and achievements and so on, to qualify for the next age. Most importantly, the Age does not advance until all players are ready to advance. This was described as "rubber banding" gameplay by some of the junket players, and it certainly sounds like it.
As a matter of gameplay, it means you're stuck at the pace the AI will dictate. If they design the AI to play poorly (as has nearly always been the case in Civ games, since few of them put any serious effort into the complex and challenging task of designing a deep and thoughtful AI technology to control the computer opponents), you have to spin your wheels waiting for those AI players to catch up before the game will advance.
I think many, even most, Civ players would prefer serious work be done to the AI. Improve it to the point where it can meaningfully and interestingly challenge human players. Traditionally, in Civ, the AI was just given very rudimentary scripts that could not challenge. This was "balanced" by giving the AI sometimes enormous bonuses (cheats). Which have sometimes backfired; high difficulties in VI for example start with extra units like settlers, which can be captured by an aggressive human (before or after the settler has formed a city) which turns the AI's cheat into a human advantage.
Instead, it appears Firaxis is going to lean on this rubberbanding to keep the game "interesting" across play. That doesn't exactly sound very promising, but I guess we'll have to see how it works in practice.
Also, upon an age switch, the term "reset" has been used. You don't have nearly as much control over the city's population as you traditionally have in Civ all the way back to I. One of the few ways VII appears to offer control over the pop is in how you can select what improvements might (or might not) go onto a tile. Granary, Library, etc. In Civ fashion, you have to build these. But, on age switch, the old buildings "reset."
I haven't found any very clear information as to what the "reset" means, but one thing that is clear is you'll have to build tile stuff three times over the course of the game. Once initially, then twice more when you're allowed to move to Exploration, and then Modern. So that's ... different.
One of the core tenants of Civ was always "what are your cities doing?" That "turn economy". Each turn, the city can "do something." It might be making a unit, or an improvement, or a wonder. It could take a city most of the game to deploy the full suite of improvements, from factories to universities and so on. The "turn economy" was a critical thing to manage, and now you'll have to pay that cost twice more. It's a very different way of looking at how Civ plays compared to the previous six iterations.
Now, in VII, you'll have to "redo" improvement work repeatedly throughout the game. How that plays out isn't clear right now, because Firaxis didn't allow any of the junket participants to see what happens when Antiquity transitions over to Exploration.
They didn't say it explicitly, but it looks and sounds like they're keeping the one-unit-per-hex limit. Just with a new tweak because they're adding Commanders, which is a retitled General that has new powers. Units no longer promote, only Commanders. And those Commanders have trees to select from depending on what you want that Commander to specialize in; so one might have a larger unit limit, while another has the max raw combat bonuses, and so on.
The Commanders can also "summon" units from elsewhere in your empire, takes a few turns apparently. They can further "collect up" units next to them into that Commander's personal retinue that removes the units from the board and places them in the Commander's hex. Then you just move the Commander until you decide to deploy, and they all pop out into surrounding hexes. I couldn't find any comment about what happens if, say, a collapsed Commander is attacked; are all the units lost like in the old Doom Stacks? Do they forcibly pop out there? Is one picked (randomly or otherwise) to defend? Unknown right now.
One of the other big core tenets of Civilization was that of the civilization. You and any other player had one that was guided from turn one through to the end. Now, that's not the case in VII. You pick a leader, but each leader has trees of options to pick from that focus that leader into various strengths. And while the leaders are apparently famous leaders from history, in VII they're not tied to their civ; so Cleopatra could be leading the Romans (and so on). It's basically just an avatar now, not a true leader of that civ.
Atop that, you have a "civilization" you pick three times, once per age. The civ of Antiquity will be replaced by your choice in Exploration, and again in Modern. You have to "qualify" for what civs are available to repick from based on what you accomplish during the age. There are tech or culture qualifiers, as well as things like improvements or even terrain. One junket participant related a story told to him by a Dev that said they had a game with lots of mountains, and accordingly they were offered the option to select Incas upon leaving Antiquity.
I couldn't find any mention of what happens to your "old" civ upon an Age switch, from units to bonuses. Do old units stay but are underpowered? Do you have to upgrade them? What about unique units; do they upgrade into the modern non-unique, do you lose them, what? Old bonuses; are they legacy and your new civ adds to them, or do you just lose the old and now have the new modifiers instead? Unknown.
Art and music, whatever. Big deal, yawn. Of course they have animators and all that, and those people filed stuff for release. The screen shots look nice. Quite wonderful, good job, but it's ultimately fluff compared to the gameplay that is the heart of a game.
They wanted to start the hype train. Well, it's starting. But right now we just don't know much about the actual game we're going to get. My main concern at the moment is it looks like, despite their marketing copy continuing to lean on "test of time" and "build a civilization" and all that which has existed throughout the entire franchise ... it kind of looks like they really want to just give us three smaller games that vaguely link together.
One ancient, one medieval, one modern. They even talk about "campaign" rather than game. You play the three Ages as a full campaign, apparently in their eyes. That doesn't quite fill me with hope and confidence that what they're planning on delivering is going to be true Civilization game.
You started with a settler, you had a leader who represented a civilization, and you played the game. Building, growing, fighting. 4Xing. That was fun. Still is. Shit, I play VI even now, hardly a month goes by I don't clock hours on it.
VII ... I don't know. This Age thing, the rubberbanding, the continual repicking of Civ attributes, it sounds like they (still) haven't managed to build an AI that can play their game really well. But rather than just let it get snowballed as before, they're artificially breaking the game into three sub-games to "even the odds" and limit how long the snowball has to roll downhill, gathering size.
Guess we'll find out in February. Right now I'm very cautious, and waiting for concrete information.
PS: multiplayer isn't a solution to lacking AI as far as I'm concerned. If you like multiplayer Civilization, I hope you enjoy your multiplayer gameplay. But I play Civ to relax, and I do that by having only the ruleset to compete against. Civ has never been a game I have even the slightest interest in playing against a person. Playing against the ruleset, the "computer", is relaxing and fun for me. That's all I want; to play "against the computer."
One game I really like is Compact Conflict, which lets you play games in a few minutes. I don't play it anymore because it's too easy for me now, but I think it's a great design. One thing they...
Exemplary
One game I really like is Compact Conflict, which lets you play games in a few minutes. I don't play it anymore because it's too easy for me now, but I think it's a great design.
One thing they did to make the game go fast is limit the number of moves you can make per turn - you start out with 3, and can get 4 or 5 by making improvements. Also, the game is normally over in 12 turns.
Based on that, I'm definitely in favor of tall versus wide - it's just less stuff to manage. Though, limiting moves directly seems better? You still need to think about what the best possible moves are.
Another possibility is the way Ozymandius does it. There's no limit on cities, but moving armies costs food, which you have a limited supply of. Also, Armies are quite expensive to build. They also do simultaneous turns which probably helps for multiplayer. (I wouldn't know since I just play single player games.)
The Catch-22 you talk about does seem annoying. Hopefully they came up with a different option for what to do with a captured city? Destroying a city really is an evil thing - it would be weird if that weren't an atrocity. But maybe they could be nerfed in some way that's not destroying them.
Thank you so much for Compact Conflict. I think it's the perfect tool to show off so many interesting, if annoying, inherent conflicts in such games. It is sadly a little too simple/easy once you...
Thank you so much for Compact Conflict. I think it's the perfect tool to show off so many interesting, if annoying, inherent conflicts in such games. It is sadly a little too simple/easy once you understand the rules (jumped to evil difficulty game 2 and won on game 3 onward).
I think in general 4x games need to asses WHAT the player is doing. In the early game micromanaging a civ's tile could literally be game changing. By late game 90% of them are to be ignored. There's a couple of games out there that have toyed with this by limiting options. The main ones I know of are:
Solium Infernum (all versions)
Nexus 5x
Stellaris (sorta)
and technically, Masters of Orion 3 (didn't make it live, but it was original part of the plan that you only got so many options a turn to influence your empire, and the rest was handled by councilors)
Most of these just hard limit actions per turn, but then also have a major issue with players just being forced to focus anything that gives them more actions (since it's such a huge upgrade in your ability to do anything). Stellaris kinda sorta handles the "oh shit my empire is huge" issue by having you section off parts of it to be governed (something many people hate and rarely works super well).
Oddly I actually like the idea of an Age system, if just to represent the different stages of the game. I wish though that rather than just wiping the slate clean, you actually got a different focus. Abstracting out a lot of the mostly useless micromanagment that occurs in the late game and instead focusing on larger policy/strategy decisions would be a really neat way to help do this.
Alternatively there's also the Endless series approach, which is just making really good menus to do all your micromanaging in (and I still don't love it but at least telling every single population where to be isn't a massive pain in the ass).
In Compact Conflct on “Evil” difficulty with four players, I often win, but sometimes the starting board position gives a computer player too much of an edge. There are also borderline cases where...
In Compact Conflct on “Evil” difficulty with four players, I often win, but sometimes the starting board position gives a computer player too much of an edge. There are also borderline cases where it could go either way. So, if I play several games, there will be some cakewalks but not all. Changing turn order (going first or last) changes strategy too.
It took me longer to get that good, so maybe you’re just better at strategy games than me?
So i'm going to focus on this as there's too much else go into. First, as you identified to an extent, Civ has a SERIOUS snowballing problem. Even in PvP, the fact that you can take your opponents...
I think many, even most, Civ players would prefer serious work be done to the AI. Improve it to the point where it can meaningfully and interestingly challenge human players.
So i'm going to focus on this as there's too much else go into.
First, as you identified to an extent, Civ has a SERIOUS snowballing problem. Even in PvP, the fact that you can take your opponents resources means that you are essentially "stealing" production.
If I can only produce 1 hammer per turn, and my opponent can only produce 1 hammer per turn, by turn 10 we'll have 10 hammers worth of "stuff". If i then capture his "stuff" i have 20 hammers by turn 10 (11, whatever), and thus am now vastly far ahead of any player who has not captured opponent production.
This is why "cheating" AI that just gets stat bonuses doesn't really work, and even why pvp civ is questionable at best, because the hardest the game will probably ever be, is right at the start when all you have are your own resources, but you MUST focus on somehow getting resources out of the cheating AI.
Recently this has mostly focused around early trading of luxury goods for waaaaay more gold than you could ever possibly have that early, and always focused around conquest as a way to acquire all those AI cities which have buildings and wonders you literally could not have acquire yet.
This leads to the lame duck scenario where very early in a civ game, even on the hardest difficulty, it's pretty obvious if you've won, and the entire rest of the game is a victory lap/checking off a list. Who cares what all those mid and late game techs do, the game was over when you conquered your second civ and skyrocketed up the charts.
So lets just make better AI.
Honestly, I've been looking at this problem for over a decade as a hobby thing (not from the coder side so much as looking at what people are doing and actively looking for examples of it. Arimaa for example), and I'm really not sure it can be done to the level everyone wants.
Lately everyone trots out how amazing Alpha GO is, which it is, but it's 1. A massively expensive super computer project and 2. working on a symmetric turnbased static game.
This is very important because what alpha go mostly is, is a hyper knowledgeable index that's VERY good and pruning down its options to the relevant ones. When you have exponentially more options per turn, the AI's get worse and worse.
Consider for example that while a human child can feasibly beat mario 3 or later, I don't know of any AI that can "play" the game like a human and actually finish the game, let alone from some learning model. AI's are tremendously bad at anything verging on "exploration", and I don't really think we'll see an AI, of the kind people think about, finish something like Super Mario 64 anytime soon (10+ years easy).
But, that brings us to playbooks, because that's what the top chess AI's, and arguably what Alpha Go does as well. Just studies literally every game its ever played with perfect recall, and plays the moves that gave it the best odds, and if that entire tree dead ends, winds back.
In a Civ like environment I think the only viable AI solution would be one that is a massive pain in the ass to create and keep working. You'd basically want it to emulate top player strategies as much as possible, but still need to be smart enough to handle when things "go off script", and just like all the other AI's, almost everything will fall to pieces and be useless the moment there's a substantial update.
Still this worked pretty well for Dawn of War back in the day various people making AI mods that were much more challenging because at the bare minimum they had sane build orders rather than the nonsense their initial heuristics went for. I'm skeptical it can handle the extreme complexity of something like Civ, but I do think it'll be the "least bad" option.
Another approach is to make the game shorter, so it ends around when it’s obvious who is going to win. Ozymandius has a pretty good system for that - there are various milestones that award stars,...
Another approach is to make the game shorter, so it ends around when it’s obvious who is going to win. Ozymandius has a pretty good system for that - there are various milestones that award stars, like a large enough population, large enough army, or enough conquered cities. When someone has enough stars, the game is over, typically in a couple hours. It’s balanced so that it happens around when a player is snowballing, so the win seems earned. (And then, you can keep playing if you really want, but it feels kind of pointless.)
It’s strictly an ancient history game, though. It doesn’t have the same scope.
There's an interview with the producer, Ed Beach, on the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/aug/20/civilization-7-history-firaxis-games-civilization-6 It seems like they're...
It seems like they're quite radically changing the pacing of the game, as well as the leader/civilization selection system. Personally I'm very excited to play this and will probably pre-order.
and Millennia Humankind Notably, both of those games have mixed reviews, so if Civ VII can bring them together into a better-feeling experience I'll be interested.
That’s why Civilization 7’s campaign has been split into three ages – Antiquity, Exploration and Modern – with each ending in a dramatic explosion of global crises. “Breaking the game into chapters lets people get through history in a more digestible fashion,” Beach says.
and
Breaking Civilization 7 into chapters also gives campaigns a new rhythm. As you approach the end of an age, you’ll begin to face global crises. In Antiquity, for instance, you can see a proliferation of independent powers similar to the tribes that tore down Rome.
That sounds exciting! That'll be great. I always feel conflicted playing certain civs that have amazing history and beautiful units, but in real life, sadly, the modern era leaders are terrible...
That sounds exciting!
When moving from Antiquity to Exploration and later Exploration to Modern, you select a new civilisation to lead. You’ll retain all the cities you controlled before but have access to different technologies and attributes. This may seem strange, but it’s built to reflect history: think of London, which was once run by the Romans before being supplanted by the Anglo-Saxons. No empire lasts for ever, but they don’t all collapse, either.
That'll be great. I always feel conflicted playing certain civs that have amazing history and beautiful units, but in real life, sadly, the modern era leaders are terrible people. It'll be nice to pick a new "name" and culture for the next era. Also minimizes the desire to not pick a great civ only because their bonuses get outdated quickly.
And I always feel like the age of exploration is exciting but so short. Too short to really enjoy when I'm rushing towards modern era. It'll be nice to spend a bit more time there. Hopefully it'll be like playing a series of three shorter campaign but with the continuity of "my" people and cities.
They'll probably talk about it in the steam, but what do you think the challenges will be for the exploration and modern eras? Industrial revolution and climate change are my guesses.
While we're waiting for Civ VII, check out Millennia. You get that feeling of seasonality to to world, with different eras that focus on different kinds of play, and the ability to direct the...
While we're waiting for Civ VII, check out Millennia. You get that feeling of seasonality to to world, with different eras that focus on different kinds of play, and the ability to direct the course of the world's development if you're quick.
Pacing and multiplayer being a non-interactive, boring boat race... And pricing and DLC-ification... And performance, once there are more than a couple hundred discrete units spawned in the...
Pacing and multiplayer being a non-interactive, boring boat race...
And pricing and DLC-ification...
And performance, once there are more than a couple hundred discrete units spawned in the game...
Devs doing a showcase live here soon-ish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc3_EO6Bj2M I started Civ at Civ V, didn't play tooooo much Civ 6 but hopefully that'll change for 7. I haven't heard too...
I started Civ at Civ V, didn't play tooooo much Civ 6 but hopefully that'll change for 7. I haven't heard too much chatter about this game here on Tildes, but I imagine some people are into it!
I played* a lot.... I remember when they first unveiled hex grids it was such a big deal!! And then they changed unit placement so you don't just move a stack of doom and that's cool too. For me,...
I played* a lot.... I remember when they first unveiled hex grids it was such a big deal!! And then they changed unit placement so you don't just move a stack of doom and that's cool too.
For me, I'm a patient and old gamer. I have a huge library of media and nearly no time to play. I haven't even played any of the scenarios for 6....
Honestly doubt there will be a lot beyond new civs, new music, new leaders, new units, new animation....maybe some new resources and new spy moves? I'm not sure what modern games can do to wrest $70-80 from my cold shriveled hands anymore, but it's okay because I'm not the target market anyway.
I'm actually most excited about having more Christopher Tin music because I can listen to it on loop while I am not playing any game at all
Edit:
* "play" as in treat it like playdoh and sand. I don't challenge myself at all -- I always play settler, maybe chieftain. And I have been known to occasionally save scum even then.
Good heavens hex grids was 2010, a whole dang 15 years ago?!?! So old
Similar boat here! I remember the first civilization and playing it as a young kid with a trainer that would keep my money maxed out so I could just get to building. I really do feel like this is...
Similar boat here! I remember the first civilization and playing it as a young kid with a trainer that would keep my money maxed out so I could just get to building. I really do feel like this is a series that has just always been there my whole life and it's still exciting to see the next iteration of it even though I most likely won't be playing it.
If anyone is interested, there is a great podcast called [designer notes] (https://www.designer-notes.com/) where soren johnson does interviews with game developers. Soren worked at firaxis since near when it was started up through civ 4ish I believe and has made off world trading company and old world. He has a great interview with cid meier for about 4 hours and it's really fascinating to hear all about the 80's/90s game dev scene and how things were done back then. He also has another interview with jake solomon (of xcom fame) who also worked at Firaxis near when it was created and it was a great interview where they went through the early years of working there as two young devs just getting started in the industry, really worth a listen too.
Finally, just want to share because why not, that I had a really strong emotional reaction watching the trailer. My father was always a huge civ fan and through his retirement he had racked up thousands of hours in civ4, 5 and 6. He was in the nursing home with civ 6 running on his laptop all day up until he passed away a few months ago. I was just thinking as I saw the trailer how excited he would have been and he'll never get to see civ 7. I've always thought how I'm in my mid 40's and have gamed since the 80's and still really look forward to seeing the new games come out every year and want to always know what is next. I wonder if civ will keep standing the test of time and if they'll be a civ 15 that I may never get to see myself. Either way, a new civilization will always be a major milestone in my eyes and I look forward to seeing what they cook up this time around.
Ahh, I'm sorry to hear about your father. Yes, he would have been excited for its announcement :') That's my life goal: retire healthy enough to spend thousands of hours gaming, and even if my kid...
Ahh, I'm sorry to hear about your father. Yes, he would have been excited for its announcement :')
That's my life goal: retire healthy enough to spend thousands of hours gaming, and even if my kid doesn't quite know what to say to me anymore because all this new tech I won't understand, they could ask me what I'm playing today and I could talk about that.
One thing I will give Firaxis is that they're not afraid to experiment and try new things, even in their biggest franchise. Every new Civ is so different from the last that a significant amount of...
Honestly doubt there will be a lot beyond new civs, new music, new leaders, new units, new animation....maybe some new resources and new spy moves?
One thing I will give Firaxis is that they're not afraid to experiment and try new things, even in their biggest franchise. Every new Civ is so different from the last that a significant amount of players stays with the previous instalment. (I'm one of the cranky old-timers who stayed with 4 when 5 was released, although I later moved on to 6. And later to Humankind, but that's a different story.)
Well, the killer feature they brag about in the stream is shamelessly stolen from Humankind, so there's that. I have a number of gripes with Civ 5 and 6, and it's like the developers of Humankind...
Well, the killer feature they brag about in the stream is shamelessly stolen from Humankind, so there's that.
I have a number of gripes with Civ 5 and 6, and it's like the developers of Humankind read my mind and fixed (almost) all of them. It's not a perfect game, but it improved on most points where I personally thought the later Civilization instalments were lacking. And of course; the killer feature: Civilizations in Humankind are era-locked, and you chose a new civilization for every era. That's really good for game balance and immersion.
So yeah, I think Civ 7 looks promising, but I'd much rather have Humankind 2.
And the fact that is has a unique civilization as a pre-order bonus is a big red flag for how they will monetize the game.
I'm not sure what I was expecting, but nothing there looks different from any of the Civ games before it? You can build cities, fight people, trade, and engage in diplomacy. Ok? Show me something...
I'm not sure what I was expecting, but nothing there looks different from any of the Civ games before it? You can build cities, fight people, trade, and engage in diplomacy.
Ok? Show me something new? For a new strategy game to be interesting there has to be a mechanical nuance that feels interesting to play with; showing off the unit combat animations will not pique my interest. For all that they called it the "gameplay" trailer, they explicitly showed no UI, and the UI is the game for a strategy game.
Yeah this is the usual bait and switch. I wish there was someone who just went through these videos and tagged them honestly as "teaser/render shots/actual fucking gameplay". As it stands we know...
Yeah this is the usual bait and switch. I wish there was someone who just went through these videos and tagged them honestly as "teaser/render shots/actual fucking gameplay". As it stands we know the new game will look pretty, neat, and will have some sort of disaster stuff (MAYBE).
Oh and more animations for me to skip through after someone denounces me for the 30th time
I'm curious about climate change. In the trailer there's a hurricane, volcano erupting, lightening storm and.....snow in the Japanese city. If they add climate change as a major version feature:...
I'm curious about climate change. In the trailer there's a hurricane, volcano erupting, lightening storm and.....snow in the Japanese city.
If they add climate change as a major version feature: mega thrust earthquakes, ring of fire geographical festure, rising sea levels inundating coastlines, sea caps melts opening artic passages.....and victory condition includes mitigating collective carbon climate collapse despite some civs dragging their feet, I'd honestly throw $80 at it.......and be glad to eat my hat from my other comment being not excited for mere graphical/unit updates.
Climate change conditions are already part of the DLC in Civ 6, I think it was called Gathering Storm. The mechanics felt a bit clunky and almost felt like they didn't matter because you could...
Climate change conditions are already part of the DLC in Civ 6, I think it was called Gathering Storm. The mechanics felt a bit clunky and almost felt like they didn't matter because you could usually get victory before it really became a problem. If they expand on that mechanic and make it more fleshed out I think it could be a welcome addition.
Yeah, if they went all the way back to Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri with a full on climate system, I'd be interested. Something that made the late game more strategic would be welcome. I suppose...
Yeah, if they went all the way back to Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri with a full on climate system, I'd be interested. Something that made the late game more strategic would be welcome. I suppose we'll see.
Haha right? Or a natural wonder like the Reefs disappearing, or that lake or river your city depends on is now toxic, or that coastal city now swamp marsh or entirely gone So from the stream, no,...
Haha right? Or a natural wonder like the Reefs disappearing, or that lake or river your city depends on is now toxic, or that coastal city now swamp marsh or entirely gone
So from the stream, no, nothing new with regards to climate change has been announced. Just build your civ and add wonders and add army units. It looks gorgeous but honestly just more of the same :/
I'm glad the art style is going more of a Civ V realistic route rather than the more cartoonish Civ VI. I never noticed how much the art style mattered in the series until VI came along and I...
I'm glad the art style is going more of a Civ V realistic route rather than the more cartoonish Civ VI. I never noticed how much the art style mattered in the series until VI came along and I found myself not liking it as much as V and IV. Seems like a minor thing, but I guess it gets exacerbated when you're staring at a virtual map for hours and hours.
If they have native play by email support I'd consider purchasing it. I have a lot of friends who enjoy civ but it's hard to coordinate time to play together (especially now that I live on the...
If they have native play by email support I'd consider purchasing it.
I have a lot of friends who enjoy civ but it's hard to coordinate time to play together (especially now that I live on the other side of the world) and the "play by cloud" they implemented in civ 6 had issues the few times I got people together to try and use it. Haven't been able to get my friends to try a 3rd party program that handles that aspect for us.
It puzzles me that it wouldn't have support for it built in. It would make people play civ way more if they had the option to play asynchronously considering how long games take.
What will being on the Switch hold back? It might have a lower graphics option that's less detailed in its greebles on the units, but I don't think that the prettiness of the game is what will...
What will being on the Switch hold back? It might have a lower graphics option that's less detailed in its greebles on the units, but I don't think that the prettiness of the game is what will convince buyers?
Civ VI struggles on the switch. It's incredibly laggy and prone to freezing/crashing. I can see how people might worry that if the game is being released on the switch, they may have scrapped...
Civ VI struggles on the switch. It's incredibly laggy and prone to freezing/crashing. I can see how people might worry that if the game is being released on the switch, they may have scrapped features and mechanics to make sure it can run at all on decade-old mobile hardware.
With that said, with a successor to the switch on the horizon, maybe it's nothing to worry about
Switch, any of the consoles, are an issue for several reasons. First, it divides the Dev team. Those are resources not going to the core PC version. It's a distraction, it's folks that have to...
Switch, any of the consoles, are an issue for several reasons.
First, it divides the Dev team. Those are resources not going to the core PC version. It's a distraction, it's folks that have to monitor and help with the code (or a console version of the code) working across all the platforms, and so on.
Second, Take Two is apparently releasing day and date across all platforms. Further, they're highlighting multiplayer across all platforms as a day one feature. Meaning, PC players, Switch players, PS5 players, whoever, can all go into lobbies together.
That's a not-small problem if you're a PC Civ fan.
Console releases have to lock months ahead of time, because console releases have to be vetted and verified. So even though release is six months away, really it's more like four months away since they don't have those full six months to fiddle and balance and tweak the game. Sometime around December, the code has to be locked and shipped off for the console partners to approve it for console release.
That cross-platform play also means they have to simplify the game since consoles are involved. And it's clear they have. The city cap could easily be such an example; consoles usually have lower specs than a lot of PCs (especially a Switch), so it's not just a matter of the consoles having lower graphics. They also have to have smaller maps, with less going on (like fewer units, fewer cities to calculate, etc) since lower specs usually means less memory and so on.
For example, in Civ, you used to have control over what each population point in a city was doing; what tiles they were working. In VII you apparently don't anymore. All cities work all their tiles all the time. There's some mechanic or something where when you grow (either the border or the pop) that the player can pick what "kind" of tile that new tile is, but then it's locked and you can't fiddle with it anymore. That kind of thing saves having to recalculate, streamlines the per-turn processing to ease the burden on consoles, etc.
That's simplified gameplay compared to classic Civ gameplay. Old Civ rules, you could have a need for gold, or production, or food ,and rearrange your entire empire to refocus accordingly; not anymore. Looking over what's known right now about VII, a several gameplay mechanics have been simplified or made more "gamey" in certain ways. It's not necessarily any kind of huge stretch to see how consoles (which basically always lack the flexibility of control that a keyboard/mouse offers) could be impacting the design choices that've gone into VII.
So yeah, console being positioned centrally alongside PC in Civ VII isn't exactly a good thing for PC Civ players. It appears to be having some not-small impacts on VII, on everything about VII. It's not unfair for PC Civ players to have a less than delighted view of these changes that appear to be coming with the next iteration of Civ.
Obviously, even with the needed console lead time, there's still some months for Firaxis to adjust the game. But with only four-ish remaining, it seems unreasonable to expect massive, wholesale changes to what they've unveiled so far are likely. And what is known now is ... different in a number of areas. Different in that it's very much unlike traditional Civilization gameplay.
Clearly we'll know more once the game makes it out into the wild, but right now it's not all sunshine and roses. Time will tell.
I'm always annoyed when Dev's call a trailer "Gameplay" and it's just inside the game footage. No actual gameplay, not explanation, no highlight of what's new or changed. I'm still excited for the game, but this didn't offer much of anything but a bit more hype, there are literally no details about the game that get revealed.
It is a little redundant, but it is kinda the trailer for the gameplay showcase they just released which does actually talk about the gameplay at a high level direction perspective.
Also a (some?) youtuber(s) got access to play a bit and has a video that goes into detail
I just stumbled across this last night, thanks for sharing though, I am really excited after watching that gameplay. The verticality of the maps is really interesting and I love that they changed queue management and development.
Firaxis has a ton of stuff still under wraps, and they've got until February before they lock the ruleset and release. So who knows what'll change. But what they've hinted or revealed right now isn't exactly all sunshine and roses.
I've been playing Civilization since I. Literally thousands and thousands of hours in the franchise's various iterations. III was a very dark time, for a number of reasons which look like they might be relevant to what's being indicated in VII.
One of the biggest strategic balancing factors in Civilization has always been "Tall v Wide." Tall is generally defined as fewer but more powerful cities, while wide was more cities (which might or might not equal the power of Tall). The game's rules, since dev teams have come in after Sid and started "putting their stamp" on the franchise have constantly waged wars back and forth across this divide. Devs who hate wide always structure the rules to support Tall, and so on.
VII has very clearly declared for Tall again. There's a hard cap on how many cities a civ can have. At least in the 1st Age of VII gameplay, it's a handful; comments from players invited to the junket indicated the starting cap was three and had only risen to seven or nine by the end of that age after advancements were factored). One of the big gameplay issues with III was how to "max out" your civ by settling your "allowed" cities while also needing to balance conquest.
Civ was one of the original 4X games. EXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate. Each of those Xs pretty much means, sooner or later, you're fighting against other civs. When you fight in Civ, you're fighting over cities at the end of the day. V and then VI tried to make the map very tactical (compared to Doom Stacks which felt more strategic in I and II and even III and IV), but it's mostly just a sideshow, those "tactical" battles on the map. Since their meaning and result collapses back down to which cities are threatened and then captured militarily.
And the same III issue of "I'm capped, but now I've just captured new cities" was mentioned in commentary from the press junket all this current VII information is coming from. People who had capped their empires, and then acquired other cities, and were being penalized for it. Because that's what the cap ultimately does; penalizes you for having more cities. III had some very harsh penalties, and the ruleset made it abundantly clear you were not supposed to go above the cap for any reason.
How harsh are VII's? Well, we don't know quite know yet because this was a press junket. None of the participants were allowed to get footage or images independently to show us; they were all given a packet of information. They were only allowed to play the first (of three) ages in the game, and of course rules and development are still in flux.
But there is a cap, and you apparently do have to "figure out" what to do with conquests once more. Under old civ rules, destroying a city was treated by the AI as a horrific thing. Which was one of the problems with III. You'd capture a city, but couldn't really keep it since doing so not only didn't get you any advantage, it would hurt your other cities by doing so since the rules penalized your entire empire for being over the cap. So you'd have to destroy it, but that'd black mark you forever as a war criminal.
Catch-22, very not fun to play against. Especially since, if you give it back, the AI would probably just declare war on you all over again for pretty much the same reasons as before. So you would be trapped in these loops as the game progressed, where it's like "oh, the Romans rebuilt their army and want war again; guess it's time to once more capture half their empire before I wag my finger at them admonishingly and give it all back; see you guys in two hundred more years when we have to repeat the exercise for the fourth time."
Along with city cap, the age system. Firaxis apparently "has data" that indicates a very high number of Civ games don't finish. There are a lot of reasons for this, but mostly the "positive" reason basically boils down to snowballing.
If you're losing, you usually just start another game and try again. If you're winning, some players find it boring and start again for that reason. They "snowballed" their civ's power to the point where they pretty much knew without question they'd won, but it would take more gameplay to "make the victory official."
Firaxis has concluded this is bad. And has decided to introduce a three Age system to combat it (Antiquity, Exploration, Modern). Each player has to clear certain gameplay bars, conditions and achievements and so on, to qualify for the next age. Most importantly, the Age does not advance until all players are ready to advance. This was described as "rubber banding" gameplay by some of the junket players, and it certainly sounds like it.
As a matter of gameplay, it means you're stuck at the pace the AI will dictate. If they design the AI to play poorly (as has nearly always been the case in Civ games, since few of them put any serious effort into the complex and challenging task of designing a deep and thoughtful AI technology to control the computer opponents), you have to spin your wheels waiting for those AI players to catch up before the game will advance.
I think many, even most, Civ players would prefer serious work be done to the AI. Improve it to the point where it can meaningfully and interestingly challenge human players. Traditionally, in Civ, the AI was just given very rudimentary scripts that could not challenge. This was "balanced" by giving the AI sometimes enormous bonuses (cheats). Which have sometimes backfired; high difficulties in VI for example start with extra units like settlers, which can be captured by an aggressive human (before or after the settler has formed a city) which turns the AI's cheat into a human advantage.
Instead, it appears Firaxis is going to lean on this rubberbanding to keep the game "interesting" across play. That doesn't exactly sound very promising, but I guess we'll have to see how it works in practice.
Also, upon an age switch, the term "reset" has been used. You don't have nearly as much control over the city's population as you traditionally have in Civ all the way back to I. One of the few ways VII appears to offer control over the pop is in how you can select what improvements might (or might not) go onto a tile. Granary, Library, etc. In Civ fashion, you have to build these. But, on age switch, the old buildings "reset."
I haven't found any very clear information as to what the "reset" means, but one thing that is clear is you'll have to build tile stuff three times over the course of the game. Once initially, then twice more when you're allowed to move to Exploration, and then Modern. So that's ... different.
One of the core tenants of Civ was always "what are your cities doing?" That "turn economy". Each turn, the city can "do something." It might be making a unit, or an improvement, or a wonder. It could take a city most of the game to deploy the full suite of improvements, from factories to universities and so on. The "turn economy" was a critical thing to manage, and now you'll have to pay that cost twice more. It's a very different way of looking at how Civ plays compared to the previous six iterations.
Now, in VII, you'll have to "redo" improvement work repeatedly throughout the game. How that plays out isn't clear right now, because Firaxis didn't allow any of the junket participants to see what happens when Antiquity transitions over to Exploration.
They didn't say it explicitly, but it looks and sounds like they're keeping the one-unit-per-hex limit. Just with a new tweak because they're adding Commanders, which is a retitled General that has new powers. Units no longer promote, only Commanders. And those Commanders have trees to select from depending on what you want that Commander to specialize in; so one might have a larger unit limit, while another has the max raw combat bonuses, and so on.
The Commanders can also "summon" units from elsewhere in your empire, takes a few turns apparently. They can further "collect up" units next to them into that Commander's personal retinue that removes the units from the board and places them in the Commander's hex. Then you just move the Commander until you decide to deploy, and they all pop out into surrounding hexes. I couldn't find any comment about what happens if, say, a collapsed Commander is attacked; are all the units lost like in the old Doom Stacks? Do they forcibly pop out there? Is one picked (randomly or otherwise) to defend? Unknown right now.
One of the other big core tenets of Civilization was that of the civilization. You and any other player had one that was guided from turn one through to the end. Now, that's not the case in VII. You pick a leader, but each leader has trees of options to pick from that focus that leader into various strengths. And while the leaders are apparently famous leaders from history, in VII they're not tied to their civ; so Cleopatra could be leading the Romans (and so on). It's basically just an avatar now, not a true leader of that civ.
Atop that, you have a "civilization" you pick three times, once per age. The civ of Antiquity will be replaced by your choice in Exploration, and again in Modern. You have to "qualify" for what civs are available to repick from based on what you accomplish during the age. There are tech or culture qualifiers, as well as things like improvements or even terrain. One junket participant related a story told to him by a Dev that said they had a game with lots of mountains, and accordingly they were offered the option to select Incas upon leaving Antiquity.
I couldn't find any mention of what happens to your "old" civ upon an Age switch, from units to bonuses. Do old units stay but are underpowered? Do you have to upgrade them? What about unique units; do they upgrade into the modern non-unique, do you lose them, what? Old bonuses; are they legacy and your new civ adds to them, or do you just lose the old and now have the new modifiers instead? Unknown.
Art and music, whatever. Big deal, yawn. Of course they have animators and all that, and those people filed stuff for release. The screen shots look nice. Quite wonderful, good job, but it's ultimately fluff compared to the gameplay that is the heart of a game.
They wanted to start the hype train. Well, it's starting. But right now we just don't know much about the actual game we're going to get. My main concern at the moment is it looks like, despite their marketing copy continuing to lean on "test of time" and "build a civilization" and all that which has existed throughout the entire franchise ... it kind of looks like they really want to just give us three smaller games that vaguely link together.
One ancient, one medieval, one modern. They even talk about "campaign" rather than game. You play the three Ages as a full campaign, apparently in their eyes. That doesn't quite fill me with hope and confidence that what they're planning on delivering is going to be true Civilization game.
You started with a settler, you had a leader who represented a civilization, and you played the game. Building, growing, fighting. 4Xing. That was fun. Still is. Shit, I play VI even now, hardly a month goes by I don't clock hours on it.
VII ... I don't know. This Age thing, the rubberbanding, the continual repicking of Civ attributes, it sounds like they (still) haven't managed to build an AI that can play their game really well. But rather than just let it get snowballed as before, they're artificially breaking the game into three sub-games to "even the odds" and limit how long the snowball has to roll downhill, gathering size.
Guess we'll find out in February. Right now I'm very cautious, and waiting for concrete information.
PS: multiplayer isn't a solution to lacking AI as far as I'm concerned. If you like multiplayer Civilization, I hope you enjoy your multiplayer gameplay. But I play Civ to relax, and I do that by having only the ruleset to compete against. Civ has never been a game I have even the slightest interest in playing against a person. Playing against the ruleset, the "computer", is relaxing and fun for me. That's all I want; to play "against the computer."
One game I really like is Compact Conflict, which lets you play games in a few minutes. I don't play it anymore because it's too easy for me now, but I think it's a great design.
One thing they did to make the game go fast is limit the number of moves you can make per turn - you start out with 3, and can get 4 or 5 by making improvements. Also, the game is normally over in 12 turns.
Based on that, I'm definitely in favor of tall versus wide - it's just less stuff to manage. Though, limiting moves directly seems better? You still need to think about what the best possible moves are.
Another possibility is the way Ozymandius does it. There's no limit on cities, but moving armies costs food, which you have a limited supply of. Also, Armies are quite expensive to build. They also do simultaneous turns which probably helps for multiplayer. (I wouldn't know since I just play single player games.)
The Catch-22 you talk about does seem annoying. Hopefully they came up with a different option for what to do with a captured city? Destroying a city really is an evil thing - it would be weird if that weren't an atrocity. But maybe they could be nerfed in some way that's not destroying them.
Thank you so much for Compact Conflict. I think it's the perfect tool to show off so many interesting, if annoying, inherent conflicts in such games. It is sadly a little too simple/easy once you understand the rules (jumped to evil difficulty game 2 and won on game 3 onward).
I think in general 4x games need to asses WHAT the player is doing. In the early game micromanaging a civ's tile could literally be game changing. By late game 90% of them are to be ignored. There's a couple of games out there that have toyed with this by limiting options. The main ones I know of are:
Solium Infernum (all versions)
Nexus 5x
Stellaris (sorta)
and technically, Masters of Orion 3 (didn't make it live, but it was original part of the plan that you only got so many options a turn to influence your empire, and the rest was handled by councilors)
Most of these just hard limit actions per turn, but then also have a major issue with players just being forced to focus anything that gives them more actions (since it's such a huge upgrade in your ability to do anything). Stellaris kinda sorta handles the "oh shit my empire is huge" issue by having you section off parts of it to be governed (something many people hate and rarely works super well).
Oddly I actually like the idea of an Age system, if just to represent the different stages of the game. I wish though that rather than just wiping the slate clean, you actually got a different focus. Abstracting out a lot of the mostly useless micromanagment that occurs in the late game and instead focusing on larger policy/strategy decisions would be a really neat way to help do this.
Alternatively there's also the Endless series approach, which is just making really good menus to do all your micromanaging in (and I still don't love it but at least telling every single population where to be isn't a massive pain in the ass).
In Compact Conflct on “Evil” difficulty with four players, I often win, but sometimes the starting board position gives a computer player too much of an edge. There are also borderline cases where it could go either way. So, if I play several games, there will be some cakewalks but not all. Changing turn order (going first or last) changes strategy too.
It took me longer to get that good, so maybe you’re just better at strategy games than me?
So i'm going to focus on this as there's too much else go into.
First, as you identified to an extent, Civ has a SERIOUS snowballing problem. Even in PvP, the fact that you can take your opponents resources means that you are essentially "stealing" production.
If I can only produce 1 hammer per turn, and my opponent can only produce 1 hammer per turn, by turn 10 we'll have 10 hammers worth of "stuff". If i then capture his "stuff" i have 20 hammers by turn 10 (11, whatever), and thus am now vastly far ahead of any player who has not captured opponent production.
This is why "cheating" AI that just gets stat bonuses doesn't really work, and even why pvp civ is questionable at best, because the hardest the game will probably ever be, is right at the start when all you have are your own resources, but you MUST focus on somehow getting resources out of the cheating AI.
Recently this has mostly focused around early trading of luxury goods for waaaaay more gold than you could ever possibly have that early, and always focused around conquest as a way to acquire all those AI cities which have buildings and wonders you literally could not have acquire yet.
This leads to the lame duck scenario where very early in a civ game, even on the hardest difficulty, it's pretty obvious if you've won, and the entire rest of the game is a victory lap/checking off a list. Who cares what all those mid and late game techs do, the game was over when you conquered your second civ and skyrocketed up the charts.
So lets just make better AI.
Honestly, I've been looking at this problem for over a decade as a hobby thing (not from the coder side so much as looking at what people are doing and actively looking for examples of it. Arimaa for example), and I'm really not sure it can be done to the level everyone wants.
Lately everyone trots out how amazing Alpha GO is, which it is, but it's 1. A massively expensive super computer project and 2. working on a symmetric turnbased static game.
This is very important because what alpha go mostly is, is a hyper knowledgeable index that's VERY good and pruning down its options to the relevant ones. When you have exponentially more options per turn, the AI's get worse and worse.
Consider for example that while a human child can feasibly beat mario 3 or later, I don't know of any AI that can "play" the game like a human and actually finish the game, let alone from some learning model. AI's are tremendously bad at anything verging on "exploration", and I don't really think we'll see an AI, of the kind people think about, finish something like Super Mario 64 anytime soon (10+ years easy).
But, that brings us to playbooks, because that's what the top chess AI's, and arguably what Alpha Go does as well. Just studies literally every game its ever played with perfect recall, and plays the moves that gave it the best odds, and if that entire tree dead ends, winds back.
In a Civ like environment I think the only viable AI solution would be one that is a massive pain in the ass to create and keep working. You'd basically want it to emulate top player strategies as much as possible, but still need to be smart enough to handle when things "go off script", and just like all the other AI's, almost everything will fall to pieces and be useless the moment there's a substantial update.
Still this worked pretty well for Dawn of War back in the day various people making AI mods that were much more challenging because at the bare minimum they had sane build orders rather than the nonsense their initial heuristics went for. I'm skeptical it can handle the extreme complexity of something like Civ, but I do think it'll be the "least bad" option.
Another approach is to make the game shorter, so it ends around when it’s obvious who is going to win. Ozymandius has a pretty good system for that - there are various milestones that award stars, like a large enough population, large enough army, or enough conquered cities. When someone has enough stars, the game is over, typically in a couple hours. It’s balanced so that it happens around when a player is snowballing, so the win seems earned. (And then, you can keep playing if you really want, but it feels kind of pointless.)
It’s strictly an ancient history game, though. It doesn’t have the same scope.
There's an interview with the producer, Ed Beach, on the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/aug/20/civilization-7-history-firaxis-games-civilization-6
It seems like they're quite radically changing the pacing of the game, as well as the leader/civilization selection system. Personally I'm very excited to play this and will probably pre-order.
and
Millennia
Humankind
Notably, both of those games have mixed reviews, so if Civ VII can bring them together into a better-feeling experience I'll be interested.
That sounds exciting!
That'll be great. I always feel conflicted playing certain civs that have amazing history and beautiful units, but in real life, sadly, the modern era leaders are terrible people. It'll be nice to pick a new "name" and culture for the next era. Also minimizes the desire to not pick a great civ only because their bonuses get outdated quickly.
And I always feel like the age of exploration is exciting but so short. Too short to really enjoy when I'm rushing towards modern era. It'll be nice to spend a bit more time there. Hopefully it'll be like playing a series of three shorter campaign but with the continuity of "my" people and cities.
They'll probably talk about it in the steam, but what do you think the challenges will be for the exploration and modern eras? Industrial revolution and climate change are my guesses.
While we're waiting for Civ VII, check out Millennia. You get that feeling of seasonality to to world, with different eras that focus on different kinds of play, and the ability to direct the course of the world's development if you're quick.
Pacing is the problem with Civilization, so that sounds promising.
Pacing and multiplayer being a non-interactive, boring boat race...
And pricing and DLC-ification...
And performance, once there are more than a couple hundred discrete units spawned in the game...
At least the gameplay is fun... kinda...
Devs doing a showcase live here soon-ish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc3_EO6Bj2M
I started Civ at Civ V, didn't play tooooo much Civ 6 but hopefully that'll change for 7. I haven't heard too much chatter about this game here on Tildes, but I imagine some people are into it!
I played* a lot.... I remember when they first unveiled hex grids it was such a big deal!! And then they changed unit placement so you don't just move a stack of doom and that's cool too.
For me, I'm a patient and old gamer. I have a huge library of media and nearly no time to play. I haven't even played any of the scenarios for 6....
Honestly doubt there will be a lot beyond new civs, new music, new leaders, new units, new animation....maybe some new resources and new spy moves? I'm not sure what modern games can do to wrest $70-80 from my cold shriveled hands anymore, but it's okay because I'm not the target market anyway.
I'm actually most excited about having more Christopher Tin music because I can listen to it on loop while I am not playing any game at all
Edit:
* "play" as in treat it like playdoh and sand. I don't challenge myself at all -- I always play settler, maybe chieftain. And I have been known to occasionally save scum even then.
Good heavens hex grids was 2010, a whole dang 15 years ago?!?! So old
Similar boat here! I remember the first civilization and playing it as a young kid with a trainer that would keep my money maxed out so I could just get to building. I really do feel like this is a series that has just always been there my whole life and it's still exciting to see the next iteration of it even though I most likely won't be playing it.
If anyone is interested, there is a great podcast called [designer notes] (https://www.designer-notes.com/) where soren johnson does interviews with game developers. Soren worked at firaxis since near when it was started up through civ 4ish I believe and has made off world trading company and old world. He has a great interview with cid meier for about 4 hours and it's really fascinating to hear all about the 80's/90s game dev scene and how things were done back then. He also has another interview with jake solomon (of xcom fame) who also worked at Firaxis near when it was created and it was a great interview where they went through the early years of working there as two young devs just getting started in the industry, really worth a listen too.
Finally, just want to share because why not, that I had a really strong emotional reaction watching the trailer. My father was always a huge civ fan and through his retirement he had racked up thousands of hours in civ4, 5 and 6. He was in the nursing home with civ 6 running on his laptop all day up until he passed away a few months ago. I was just thinking as I saw the trailer how excited he would have been and he'll never get to see civ 7. I've always thought how I'm in my mid 40's and have gamed since the 80's and still really look forward to seeing the new games come out every year and want to always know what is next. I wonder if civ will keep standing the test of time and if they'll be a civ 15 that I may never get to see myself. Either way, a new civilization will always be a major milestone in my eyes and I look forward to seeing what they cook up this time around.
Ahh, I'm sorry to hear about your father. Yes, he would have been excited for its announcement :')
That's my life goal: retire healthy enough to spend thousands of hours gaming, and even if my kid doesn't quite know what to say to me anymore because all this new tech I won't understand, they could ask me what I'm playing today and I could talk about that.
One thing I will give Firaxis is that they're not afraid to experiment and try new things, even in their biggest franchise. Every new Civ is so different from the last that a significant amount of players stays with the previous instalment. (I'm one of the cranky old-timers who stayed with 4 when 5 was released, although I later moved on to 6. And later to Humankind, but that's a different story.)
Would love to hear your thoughts on how Humankind compares to past Civs, and if you're watching the stream, how it might compare to CIVVII.
Well, the killer feature they brag about in the stream is shamelessly stolen from Humankind, so there's that.
I have a number of gripes with Civ 5 and 6, and it's like the developers of Humankind read my mind and fixed (almost) all of them. It's not a perfect game, but it improved on most points where I personally thought the later Civilization instalments were lacking. And of course; the killer feature: Civilizations in Humankind are era-locked, and you chose a new civilization for every era. That's really good for game balance and immersion.
So yeah, I think Civ 7 looks promising, but I'd much rather have Humankind 2.
And the fact that is has a unique civilization as a pre-order bonus is a big red flag for how they will monetize the game.
yeah, the pre-order civ is kind of gross, boo microtransactions :( it's not like the game is going to be cheap either
I'm not sure what I was expecting, but nothing there looks different from any of the Civ games before it? You can build cities, fight people, trade, and engage in diplomacy.
Ok? Show me something new? For a new strategy game to be interesting there has to be a mechanical nuance that feels interesting to play with; showing off the unit combat animations will not pique my interest. For all that they called it the "gameplay" trailer, they explicitly showed no UI, and the UI is the game for a strategy game.
Yeah this is the usual bait and switch. I wish there was someone who just went through these videos and tagged them honestly as "teaser/render shots/actual fucking gameplay". As it stands we know the new game will look pretty, neat, and will have some sort of disaster stuff (MAYBE).
Oh and more animations for me to skip through after someone denounces me for the 30th time
I'm curious about climate change. In the trailer there's a hurricane, volcano erupting, lightening storm and.....snow in the Japanese city.
If they add climate change as a major version feature: mega thrust earthquakes, ring of fire geographical festure, rising sea levels inundating coastlines, sea caps melts opening artic passages.....and victory condition includes mitigating collective carbon climate collapse despite some civs dragging their feet, I'd honestly throw $80 at it.......and be glad to eat my hat from my other comment being not excited for mere graphical/unit updates.
Climate change conditions are already part of the DLC in Civ 6, I think it was called Gathering Storm. The mechanics felt a bit clunky and almost felt like they didn't matter because you could usually get victory before it really became a problem. If they expand on that mechanic and make it more fleshed out I think it could be a welcome addition.
Yeah, if they went all the way back to Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri with a full on climate system, I'd be interested. Something that made the late game more strategic would be welcome. I suppose we'll see.
SMAC was a masterpiece
Plate tectonics or bust! Imagine your city moves a tile lol
Haha right? Or a natural wonder like the Reefs disappearing, or that lake or river your city depends on is now toxic, or that coastal city now swamp marsh or entirely gone
So from the stream, no, nothing new with regards to climate change has been announced. Just build your civ and add wonders and add army units. It looks gorgeous but honestly just more of the same :/
I'm glad the art style is going more of a Civ V realistic route rather than the more cartoonish Civ VI. I never noticed how much the art style mattered in the series until VI came along and I found myself not liking it as much as V and IV. Seems like a minor thing, but I guess it gets exacerbated when you're staring at a virtual map for hours and hours.
If they have native play by email support I'd consider purchasing it.
I have a lot of friends who enjoy civ but it's hard to coordinate time to play together (especially now that I live on the other side of the world) and the "play by cloud" they implemented in civ 6 had issues the few times I got people together to try and use it. Haven't been able to get my friends to try a 3rd party program that handles that aspect for us.
It puzzles me that it wouldn't have support for it built in. It would make people play civ way more if they had the option to play asynchronously considering how long games take.
I feel like that'll really hold it back that they're releasing it on the switch still...
What will being on the Switch hold back? It might have a lower graphics option that's less detailed in its greebles on the units, but I don't think that the prettiness of the game is what will convince buyers?
Civ VI struggles on the switch. It's incredibly laggy and prone to freezing/crashing. I can see how people might worry that if the game is being released on the switch, they may have scrapped features and mechanics to make sure it can run at all on decade-old mobile hardware.
With that said, with a successor to the switch on the horizon, maybe it's nothing to worry about
Switch, any of the consoles, are an issue for several reasons.
First, it divides the Dev team. Those are resources not going to the core PC version. It's a distraction, it's folks that have to monitor and help with the code (or a console version of the code) working across all the platforms, and so on.
Second, Take Two is apparently releasing day and date across all platforms. Further, they're highlighting multiplayer across all platforms as a day one feature. Meaning, PC players, Switch players, PS5 players, whoever, can all go into lobbies together.
That's a not-small problem if you're a PC Civ fan.
Console releases have to lock months ahead of time, because console releases have to be vetted and verified. So even though release is six months away, really it's more like four months away since they don't have those full six months to fiddle and balance and tweak the game. Sometime around December, the code has to be locked and shipped off for the console partners to approve it for console release.
That cross-platform play also means they have to simplify the game since consoles are involved. And it's clear they have. The city cap could easily be such an example; consoles usually have lower specs than a lot of PCs (especially a Switch), so it's not just a matter of the consoles having lower graphics. They also have to have smaller maps, with less going on (like fewer units, fewer cities to calculate, etc) since lower specs usually means less memory and so on.
For example, in Civ, you used to have control over what each population point in a city was doing; what tiles they were working. In VII you apparently don't anymore. All cities work all their tiles all the time. There's some mechanic or something where when you grow (either the border or the pop) that the player can pick what "kind" of tile that new tile is, but then it's locked and you can't fiddle with it anymore. That kind of thing saves having to recalculate, streamlines the per-turn processing to ease the burden on consoles, etc.
That's simplified gameplay compared to classic Civ gameplay. Old Civ rules, you could have a need for gold, or production, or food ,and rearrange your entire empire to refocus accordingly; not anymore. Looking over what's known right now about VII, a several gameplay mechanics have been simplified or made more "gamey" in certain ways. It's not necessarily any kind of huge stretch to see how consoles (which basically always lack the flexibility of control that a keyboard/mouse offers) could be impacting the design choices that've gone into VII.
So yeah, console being positioned centrally alongside PC in Civ VII isn't exactly a good thing for PC Civ players. It appears to be having some not-small impacts on VII, on everything about VII. It's not unfair for PC Civ players to have a less than delighted view of these changes that appear to be coming with the next iteration of Civ.
Obviously, even with the needed console lead time, there's still some months for Firaxis to adjust the game. But with only four-ish remaining, it seems unreasonable to expect massive, wholesale changes to what they've unveiled so far are likely. And what is known now is ... different in a number of areas. Different in that it's very much unlike traditional Civilization gameplay.
Clearly we'll know more once the game makes it out into the wild, but right now it's not all sunshine and roses. Time will tell.