A Civilization Of One’s Own

I already gave my initial impressions of Civilization 7 after completing the first “age” in my first game. That was mostly in reaction to all the negative comments I’d been hearing about the new installment, and how much I disagreed with them. Even after decades of seeing game fans overreact to everything, with grown adults perpetually losing their shit over the most minor inconveniences, I still haven’t learned that the stuff video game people say online only ever has the barest connection to our shared reality.

My initial impression was that the game does have several issues, ones that can and hopefully will be fixed in patches and expansions. But at its core, it’s still got the feel of the best Civilization installments, letting you grow a huge empire and compelling you to keep taking one more turn until you’ve lost entire days to it.

And after losing a couple of days to it, I’ll stand by that take. It’s pretty good.

It’s still a little “mushy” in the mid game and end game, where I felt like I was pulling a lot of levers and flipping a lot of switches (figuratively), but didn’t have a clear idea of what my goals were or how to achieve them. The game straight-up fails to give you the information you need in a way that’s useful. It’s not just a lack of tooltips; even going to the Civilopedia to look up a concept usually gave me no idea of how to do it in game.

I’m guessing that’s an issue they were aware of, since each age starts by having you choose a single advisor to give you MMORPG quest chain-style goals that remain on screen at all times. Theoretically, this would focus all of your efforts while playing, but in my game at least, there wasn’t enough info. I was told to go for the “rail tycoon victory,” with an indication of how many points I’d achieved so far, but no indication of what actually generates the points.

That also has the side-effect of making the ends of ages anti-climactic. Even if you choose to focus on one goal, the others remain active (of course). By the end of my game, I had focused everything onto the space race. Ideally this would’ve meant a big transition for my civilization in which I had to set up supply chains and technology trees and the like, but really it just meant finding the one city that had the highest production value in my civ, starting a single project, and then hoping it finished before anyone else did. And while I was waiting, I assigned projects to my other cities, and “accidentally” achieved the economic victory on some random turn when a city finished a factory or something. I’m still not sure exactly what triggered the victory, since I just got a mostly-static victory screen and a game over.

I think this ties into my even bigger problem with the game, which is the choice to separate leaders from civilizations, and divide every game of Civilization 7 into three distinct ages. I have a sense of why I believe it was done: I think it was intended to impose some kind of semi-realistic narrative structure onto the game, instead of every game being hours and hours of repetitive game mechanics.

And it’s ironic that I think it backfired completely: by imposing a narrative structure onto the game instead of trying to encourage the narrative to fall out of the mechanics, it feels even less capable of emergent narratives than the previous installments were.

One obvious problem: I don’t remember who my leader was. After looking it up, I see that I played as Ibn Battuta, an explorer who traveled throughout the known Muslim world in the 14th century. I appreciate the effort to expand the roster of leaders to historical figures that normally don’t get attention in games like this, and to recognize contributions to civilizations that aren’t just being monarchs, warriors, or politicians. The Civilization series (along with early SimCity installments) are among the few video game series that are actually educational for adults. But it’s difficult to retain anything unless you’re making use of it, and everything about the leaders in the game seems insignificant and arbitrary.

Not to mention confusing. My game had me running into Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin, who if I remember correctly were leading the Aztec and Roman civilizations respectively. Except that they’d had some run-ins before I met them, so Napoleon was now in command of the city of Capua, and Franklin’s empire included some cities with Native American names? Civilization games are all about bizarre alternate histories, but at least there’s always been a recognizable and predictable connection between leaders and civilizations, even if the civs themselves are ahistorical.

I think the bigger issue, though, is the decision to structure the game in three distinct ages. I don’t think it’s a completely bad decision, since it accomplishes what I believe it sets out to do:

Clearly wipe the slate clean of antiquated buildings and units, to avoid bizarre anachronisms like spearmen fighting tanks outside of modern cities.

Abstract the change in priorities over the millennia, from maintaining a home city, to exploring the world, to maintaining an empire in the ages of industry and information.

Give the player a clear mode switch between areas of focus, so it doesn’t feel like repeating the same tedious tasks from pre-history all the way through the 25th century.

Allow the game to reflect the collapse of civilizations, not just their rise.

There is indeed a different feel between the three ages, and it feels all but impossible to camp out in one remote corner of the globe and win the game without interacting with anyone else. My game did clearly reflect the patterns of known “real” history, with an age of building wonders, an age of competitive exploration, and an age of maintaining trade networks and production. In past installments, the differences between eras were much more subtle.

But at the risk of being over-dramatic, I’d say what’s lost is the entire idea behind Civilization in the first place: that it’s an abstraction of the history of civilization.

In previous Civilization games, you’d still see civilizations rise and fall, you’d see the switch to the age of exploration, you’d see what happens after all the land is settled and the civilizations are left fighting over scarce resources, and you’d see how a leader’s priorities change from managing a single city to managing a huge empire. But more importantly, you’d see why these changes happened, and why it made sense for you to change focus. Not because the game told you it was time to change, but because a set of influences had changed, or a set of goals had been accomplished, or your population had just plain grown to a sufficient size.

Now, I’ve never designed a strategy game, and certainly not any game that’s as complex as a Civilization. I’ve got no doubt that every decision unfolds like a fractal into hundreds of other decisions, any one of which can change the feel significantly enough that you end up with Civilization 6, which seems excellent in theory but just doesn’t feel engaging in practice. But as long as I’m playing Armchair Game Designer, I’ve got ideas about how to split the difference between the changes in Civilization 7 and the things I love about previous installments in the franchise. (Or a spin-off game, or a completely different 4x game, for that matter, since at this point it feels like the design of Civilization games is driven by the desires of the publisher at least as much as perfecting the 4x game design).

The over-arching idea is to re-emphasize the technology tree. It felt like a fundamental part of what makes a Civilization game, but the latest installment makes it feel like an afterthought. In Civ 7, advancing on the tech tree most often felt like something that was happening in the background, instead of something I would plan my strategy around. It also felt de-emphasized by the parallel Civics tree, which wasn’t nearly as interesting to me but demanded I pay as much attention to it.

I’d like to see the tech tree have a much, much larger impact on the game. Specifically, instead of just unlocking a new type of unit or a new type of building that feels more like a cosmetic change than anything else, I’d like tech advancements — or at least, the significant ones — to actually affect the mechanics of the gameplay.

There are still vestiges of this in Civ games: you’re unable to make treaties with other leaders until you’ve discovered writing, and you’re unable to trade maps until you’ve discovered cartography. And it requires a technological advancement (the compass? Navigation?) before your ships are allowed to leave shallow water and sail in the ocean. But the bulk of the technological achievements do little more than unlock something that only provides a slight increase in food or production, or a new unit that has 1 more attack value than the previous one.

Meanwhile, one of my favorite changes in Civ 7 is how workers as individual units were removed, in favor of the player choosing tiles for improvement. What if instead of being a game design change, this had been the result of a technological advancement? The game starts out with workers that you control and send to tiles to build an improvement, to regain the “hands-on” feel that’s long been part of the franchise. But once you research some kind of civic-related technology, the workers disappear and you instead choose to build improvements by picking a tile, as in the new game.

And one of my issues with that mechanic in Civ 7 is that so much of it felt arbitrary. Why are there only two buildings allowed per tile? What exactly decides which improvement is going to get replaced? What are the direct effects of replacing an existing improvement? So maybe this could be tied to technological (or civic) advancements as well: something like “architecture” could let you build urban tiles in the first place, and then an advancement let you divide tiles into parcels, and then an advancement (like skyscrapers?) let you divide tiles into even smaller parcels, etc.

Researching the wheel could open up a mechanic where you can build roads between settlements. Researching steam engines could do the same for trains and/or river routes.

As for units: technological improvements could introduce specialization and upgrades. For instance, studying archery or some such lets warriors specialize into ranged and melee. Melee warriors specialize into spearmen or swordsmen, etc. At the point you research the tech, you can choose the specialization for each existing unit already in your army. And for upgrades, you must choose to pay for each unit to upgrade or lose it to get some money back, so you don’t end up with antiquated units hanging around long past their freshness date.

My gut feeling is that these changes would reduce the trees by a lot, but that you’d end up with fewer advancements with more directly visible benefits. I know I’d be a lot more interested in the decision of what to research next if I had a clear idea of how it’d make the game more interesting (or easier/less tedious) for me as a player.