Civilization 7 Is Good, Actually?

Civilization 7 has been getting some pretty dreadful buzz around the internet, and I was happy to hear it. I’ve got a life to lead, and I can’t be devoting it to a huge time-suck on the scale of the Civilization games, so I’d have been glad to skip it. Civ 6 never really clicked for me, so maybe the series and I could finally have an amicable break-up.

Besides, even if all the bugs and UI issues that I’d been hearing about were fixed, there are still basic design decisions that sounded horrible to me. In particular, the two most fundamental design changes: separating the game into three distinct ages, and separating the leaders from the civilizations. If there’s one thing that makes this series, it’s the novelty of having, e.g. George Washington lead the United States from ancient pre-history into the space age. A Civilization game without that feels like a Sims game without plumbobs or kitchen fires.

But the problem is that it’s really pretty. I actually loved the cartoonish character designs of Civ 61, so I didn’t need them to go more photo-realistic with the art direction, but I think they struck a really good balance with the new look. It’s stylized enough for the characters to have personality, but in environments that are overall realistic enough that they feel more like a world map than a play set.

I figured that to get around my FOMO, I’d just go back and play Civilization 5 again, since it’s probably my favorite in the series.2 That — unsurprisingly — backfired, since it ate up most of a day and just put me in the mindset of wanting to play the latest and greatest.

So then I decided I’d try Civ 6 again, because I couldn’t remember what exactly I didn’t like it about it. And after several hours of playing that game, I realized… I still don’t know exactly what I don’t like about it. There’s just a weird sense of mushiness about the whole thing. I don’t have a clear sense of what I’m trying to do at any given moment, I don’t feel a direct connection between what I’m doing and what the end result is, and I don’t feel like I’m coming up with a strategy and then acting on it. Essentially, it feels like a long series of uninteresting choices.

And since it’s a three-day weekend, I decided to say screw it, YOLO, and I bought Civilization 7 knowing full well that in around eight months or so, there’ll be a special edition that’ll be a much better game for at least $20 cheaper.

Grumbling at the design changes, I started a new game last night and begrudgingly played through until my husband came into the room and told me that it was 1 AM and he was going to bed. And then immediately after breakfast this morning, I realized that I was eager to get back into the game, and I forced myself to stop at 5pm.

After that I’ve realized a couple of things: 1) I may not actually be a good videogame dude since losing so much time to them makes me just feel gross; and 2) the reviews making it sound like Civilization 7 is an unplayable failure are just ridiculous. The game absolutely has what makes a Civilization game: that compulsion to play one more turn, building, exploring, reacting, re-thinking your strategy.

It’s definitely not perfect. There are still a ton of units and systems that are inadequately explained. Units will appear and give no indication what they do or even what kind of unit they are. (What is a “migrant?” Is this unit infantry or ranged? Is this a combat ship or a trade ship?) Cities have production numbers, but I have yet to find where the numbers are coming from. (Why do I have -5 happiness? How do I improve happiness?) It’s hard to tell what buildings already exist in a city. It’s even hard to tell where the city center is, at times.

Also, the culture system and religion system are completely unintuitive. There are missionaries as in previous games, but it’s tough to tell what exactly they need to do in order to convert a city. The victory conditions mention finding “relics,” but I have yet to find out a reliable way to find them and what they have to do with religion or culture. It feels like something that’ll get improved in future DLC, but if that’s the case, I wish they’d left it out entirely and instead released a base game that could have new victory conditions added later.

After playing for several hours, I have a better idea of why they made the fundamental changes to the design. I haven’t yet finished a game — I’m still just a little bit into the second age — but I have seen an age transition. It seems clear that it’s part of Civ 7‘s attempt to make the series’s gameplay conform to a clearer narrative. Objectives are significantly (but not completely) different in each age. In my case, it’s been building wonders during antiquity, building ships and colonies during the exploration age, and I predict I’ll be focusing on science, technology, and culture in the modern age.

It acknowledges that Civilization games have always had a weird curve, where the mechanics that are fun and interesting when you’re building your founding city gradually become tedious micromanagement when you’re managing a continent-spanning empire. But it’s a shame that it enforces this division on every game, instead of having a new age based on your accomplishments in the previous age. It maps every game of Civilization 7 onto our version of history, when the series has always felt like a toolkit for creating your own alternate Earth history.

And I like the other change even less. I suppose that it’s a move to add variety, in case you’ve always wondered what would happen if Harriet Tubman led the Aztecs, but it makes everything feel disconnected and arbitrary.3 Not to mention unnecessarily confusing; in my game, I was perpetually confused by which leader controlled which city, since Napoleon was leading the Mayans and Benjamin Franklin was in charge of the Roman empire.

You end up not having a connection to much of anything, either. I could remember I was controlling the Persian empire, but couldn’t remember which leader I’d even chosen. Normally it wouldn’t be bad that I was controlling a character I’d never heard of; it’s an invitation for me to actually learn something, which is one of the best aspects of playing Civilization games. But I can’t remember any of what made my leader’s character interesting, and I don’t even know how I’d find that information at this point, so there’s little sense of personality to any of it.

I’d have to play a lot more to decide how much it works, but so far I think I would’ve preferred them to be more conservative in the changes: keep the idea of distinct ages, but let us take any civilization and its associated leader from antiquity to the modern age.

One change that I think totally works: they got rid of worker units, in favor of choosing tiles to develop at certain junction points. They’ve been circling around a solution for “too many workers” tedium for like three games now, and they’ve finally hit on one that I think perfectly splits the difference between interesting decisions and micromanagement.

The vitriol around Civilization 7 is so far removed from my experience with the game that… well, it fits in perfectly with my understanding of the video game audience. I think it’s extremely engaging now, if a bit mushy and confusing, and I can totally see my main complaints with the game as being fixable with patches and expansions.

I just wish I didn’t feel like my thematic problems with the game were due to Firaxis being too concerned about complaints of Spearmen going against Tanks in a battle. That kind of goofy alternate history is a key part of the series, and I think it should embrace it instead of trying to design around it.

1
And as I’ve said before: Civ 6’s version of Phillip II of Spain can get it.

2
Or maybe 3, since it was the installment that really got me hooked.

3
Good call that they made her specialty espionage, though.

1 And as I’ve said before: Civ 6’s version of Phillip II of Spain can get it.

2 Or maybe 3, since it was the installment that really got me hooked.

3 Good call that they made her specialty espionage, though.