When a video game series has been fortunate enough to remain in the conversation after literal decades, you know it’s been doing something right. And while sometimes that reputation and longevity comes from simply being among the first of its kind, the winning formula can only last so long before needing careful tweaks and evolutions in order to stay relevant. Sid Meier’s Civilization earned its cult status in the 90s, with an addicting mix of 4X turn-based strategy mechanics and city building. In the years that followed, the steady stream of sequels allowed the franchise to keep up with the industry, occasional competition, and offer something new with each outing. 2010’s Civ V is considered by many to be the high point of the franchise in the modern era, as 2016’s Civ VI introduced a number of big changes that not everyone was a fan of. But as seems to be the case with this series, a slew of patches and expansion packs eventually got that recent entry to an agreeable state. Nearly a decade later, Civilization VII keeps the core components and adds a few new mechanics, but launches in a somewhat underwhelming state.
The core of the game remains choosing a leader and guiding your people through the eras of history in a randomly generated Earth-like map with other AI nations. The leader selection in Civ VII offers about 20 historical figures to choose from, each featuring a unique ability bonus in many of the game’s core aspects, such as warfare, science, growth, and culture. New to the game is additional persistent progression – playing as a certain leader, as well as reaching certain milestones within a campaign, earns you profile experience, and unlocks mementos. These can be equipped into two slots of a leader, before starting the game, for yet another additional bonus. And once you’re in-game, you can also continue to earn points in Attribute skill trees aligned to the expected core elements of culture, science, diplomacy, military, and others. This allows each playthrough to feel a bit more dynamic and different, depending on the pre-equipped mementos, and the Attribute trees.
Another big change is the separation of leaders from their Civilizations. Civ VII allows players to choose Benjamin Franklin to lead ancient Greece, or Napoleon to take charge of Persia. The chosen nation, just like the leader, has their own unique perks usually in the form of units or buildings. After selecting a leader and their nation, you can also make custom adjustments to the style of the map that will be generated, as well as selecting the AI opposition or leaving it on random. Disappointingly, the map selection doesn’t provide a visual example of each option, and at launch the biggest map that can be generated is Standard in size. It’s the first of numerous steps back for this latest entry. Other settings thankfully remain, such as ability to customize game speed, and new ones like age length and disaster intensity.
With the parameters of the game set, you begin the quest for victory by your preferred means, which remain the usual options of cultural, warfare, science, and so on. On a tile-based map, you begin to explore with your starting Settler unit to find a suitable place for your first city. It’s important to get a foothold quickly, so this shouldn’t take more than a couple of turns. With your first city founded – which cannot be renamed, in another step back – you can begin to construct buildings on the nearby tiles around the city, from the granary to the barracks, which create food and production resources. These elements help your city expand overtime, as you select new tiles to take over and grow your borders. The manual tile management system returns from Civ 6, but it’s been somewhat streamlined and easier to manage, which is a positive improvement. You can also create your first warrior or scout unit, and start to explore the area. In another setback, there is no auto-explore option at launch.
As your city grows, you may eventually want to create more settlers and establish another settlement elsewhere. A big change that this entry brings is the introduction of Towns. These are settlements where you have a little bit less direct control over operations – they can instead be given a specialization. There are a few options that provide specific bonuses to your empire, or your units stationed in the town, and these bonuses can only be changed a few times per game. If you want to construct anything in a town, spending gold is the only option. Otherwise, you can also pay to convert a town into a regular city, and it will function the same as your capital and the typical Civ city management experience. This is an interesting concept that falls somewhat between running a city and working with a city-state from the previous games. Most players will probably opt to convert their towns to cities at the earliest convenience, just to have full control over production. Interestingly, all of your cities except the capital fall back to being towns during age-transitions, meaning you have to spend more money again to convert them to cities again.
Which brings us to the biggest progression-related change in Civ VII, the introduction of the Age system. While the previous Civilization games would consist of epic, steady 1000+ turn marathons, the new entry breaks up the map progress into three Ages – the Antiquity age, Exploration age, and Modern age. As the game progresses between the ages at the same time for all players, skilled players will have an advantage as they focus on earning legacy points by completing certain milestones. The milestones are like a simple quest system, asking you to compete in military, scientific, cultural and expansion goals. Researching a specific technology or taking over a neighboring city are examples of a few milestones in each age. Earning these legacy points allows you to pick some extra bonuses for your empire when the new age begins.
Age transitions also make players move on to a different civilization, with its own new set of passive bonuses. Depending on selected leader and the direction of your empire that you’ve chosen thus far, only a few civs will be available to pick from. The new age brings with it new units and buildings, and new tech trees to work through for civics and science, introduction of religion, and so on. It’s not too different overall from previous civ games, but instead of being a smooth flowing process that is independent of other players, it’s now a more rigid and map-wide transition. It’s also accompanied by a lengthy loading screen, and the turn counter resets back to zero – a minor but unsatisfying visual change.
Not all your military units may survive the age transition either, which means each new Age requires some re-organization of the armed forces. Military aggression remains at the core of the game, even if you are trying to achieve victory via other means. Diplomacy and dealing with AI was always a somewhat questionable part of the Civ experience, and the seventh chapter doesn’t bring any notable improvements. You can still agree to basic pacts with the other nations, from open borders to hosting festivals. Eventually, and for very simplistic reasons like having different cultural values or borders touching, they will declare war, and send all their units onward. If you fend off this initial assault, it becomes extremely trivial to roll back into their territory and conquer their cities instead.
Playing on the 3rd of six difficulties, the AI military tactics are very basic and often either don’t press their advantage or try to escape in very poor directions to preserve their damaged units. However, wars should still be ended within decent time, as otherwise you begin to incur negative war attrition bonuses, and other nations will begin to basically gang up on you for no reason – even your allies. Ending wars is very simplistic and another step back from previous games – you can only ask or propose your towns/cities as a bargaining chip. You can’t offer any resources and you also can’t close the peace offer window to see if the town that the enemy is willing to give up as part of the deal is in a good area. Resources are out of the equation because the system has been adjusted – rather than having 100 barrels of oil for example, the oil is now a resource that benefits a town where it is produced, and can sometimes be slotted to another town if there is a trade/transport route established.
Outside of war though, AI is pretty good at dealing with many of the existing and new concepts, such as effectively earning legacy points, handling age transitions and maximizing their civics, research, and materials. They will propose deals and setup trade routes, and push their religion to foreign lands. You can spy on them, and they will try to steal your scientific research. All of the diplomatic actions are governed by having influence points; you can’t initiate actions without accumulating enough points, and also can’t share the full benefits of a treaty even if you accept it. Other than dealing with other empires, points can also be spent to gain allyship with independent city-states, which are small towns that have a specific focus (science, commerce etc). As before, you can also eventually befriend them and make them fully join your empire as a city. As there are no more barbarians, these city states instead can be hostile and send units into your territory.
There are a lot of things going on, and on normal speed the game feels a bit too slow – you end up having lots of units from all nations roaming the map without much to do while tech and civics catch up. During this time you may want to organize your armies for future wars by stacking them on Commander units, which can combine multiple units into one tile, thus allowing for faster movement across the map and less micromanagement. Deploying the army still follows the limit of one unit per tile, however. You might also get busy managing your religion in the later ages; interestingly enough, almost all religion bonuses are focused on spreading it into foreign lands, prompting an aggressive approach. Another new dynamic element to keep an eye on are the natural disasters; placing a city near a river or volcano can have consequences if there are eruptions or flooding, possibly damaging your tiles, but providing production or food bonuses. It adds a slight dynamism to the map.
One round of Civ VII usually takes a few hours, about on par with the genre and its predecessors. But if you feel like dragging the experience out even more, you could venture into multiplayer (online or LAN).The already rough pacing of hard stops to transition between the three Ages is more evident online as the game actually brings everyone back into the lobby to select their new civ and re-pick mementos, causes more loading screens, and pretty much resets the game with a clean slate by ending wars. It feels like a three-part experience if you want to play through all the Ages in one session; there are also strange limits with a different number of players in different Ages (5 in total for the first two ages, but 8 in the modern age). On a technical level, the desync issues are mostly stable and we didn’t need to restart the game too often. Still, an online 4X turn-based experience is always going to be only for some very dedicated friend groups. A 2K account is also required and has to be created separately.
Elsewhere on the technical aspects, even in solo play, Civ VII could have used a bit more polishing time. Across multiple saves and varied settings, we experienced bugs like invisible enemy units, stuck exploration units from all AI nations, and cutscenes for dynamic events not playing or triggering correctly. The loading times are surprisingly quite long, even on a modern SSD. The UI could have also used a bit more refinement, but is generally usable. Maybe there was additional pressure due to launching at the same time on PC and consoles, for the first time. Still, the game seems to perform decently well in terms of framerate, even deep into the campaign (perhaps the stringent separation of each Age helps with internal performance issues). The art style is fairly familiar, and the undiscovered map hexes do look rather high quality. Audio design is straightforward, with a variety of music tracks that have themes somewhat relevant to the civ or the age you are in.
There’s no question that the release of a new Civilization game is a major event for fans of the genre, and you can’t accuse the latest entry of simply resting on its laurels. With recent competitors finding decent footing, such as Humankind, Ara: History Untold, and Age of Wonders 4, the genre founding franchise needed to make changes. And to be fair, there is no shortage of some major shakeups to the formula in Civ VII. However, the changes are not implemented to their full potential, and some actually feel like ideas that are borrowed from the competition. Some elements are even outright steps back from Civ V and VI, which, alongside the minor UI and technical issues, make this latest launch notably underwhelming, if not outright disastrous. Just like its predecessor at launch, there is potential here, but perhaps it’s a bit less well-realized than expected, and will take time to iron out.
