Some of the current problems of Civ 7 are technical. I experienced several soft locks, for example one situation where the "Next Turn" button stopped working; not good for a game in the series that literally invented the "one more turn" meme. Saving the game, restarting it, and reloading the save fixed the problem. I also had units turning invisible and a number of other minor bugs, which a €130 game obviously shouldn't have. On the other hand, by the time I get the last pre-purchased DLC in September, I am pretty confident that all these bugs will have gone.

The most criticized part of Civ7 is the user interface. It is bad on several levels: The minor problem is, that it isn't pretty, lacks polishing, and sure doesn't look the part of a triple A game. There are menus in Millennia, which got a lot of flak for being ugly, that look prettier than the equivalent in Civ 7. Again, I think this is something that will be fixed by the end of this year. The major problem with the UI in Civ 7 is, that it isn't good at conveying information. For example, one of the 4 victory conditions in the second age is to get the yield of 5 tiles up to above 40. Good luck figuring out how to do that, because the UI on the yield results of building, and especially overbuilding, is just horribly bad. If you build over a previous age building, the game doesn't even tell you how much yield you'll lose from that, nor does it let you choose which building to overbuild. There is no way to click on a wonder you built to find out what it does, you need to type its name in the Civilopedia. There is no menu where you can see all of your armies, and you can only see which buildings you have city by city, on a very badly formatted screen. Basically, Civ 7 keeps you guessing quite frequently, instead of giving you the detailed information you need to make an interesting decision.

The excuse, and fundamental design problem, of the bad UI in Civ 7 is that it has been designed with consoles and controllers in mind. Thus features like giving information by hovering over something with a mouse pointer, or nested tooltips, are missing, because they are hard to implement on consoles. As Civilization I actually came out 3 years before the Playstation 1, many people have always considered this first and foremost a PC game, and getting a bad interface on the PC only so that it is identical to the console interface seems like a slap in the face of all fans of the series. Ideally Civilization VII would have a functional UI on the console, and a much better UI on the PC, because the PC UI shouldn't be hampered by the limitations of consoles. At this point in time it isn't evident that Firaxis is willing to make the PC UI different from the console UI, and that unwillingness would restrict their ability to fix the problem. The UI certainly will get better over time, but it isn't obvious that it will rise up to industry standards for 4X games on the PC.

Civilization VII doesn't play like Civilization VI. In many negative Steam reviews, that is a major point. However, for people like me, who didn't especially like Civ 6, this is actually an advantage. Games like Humankind or Millennia innovated on the historical 4X genre, and it would have been stupid for Civilization to ignore that innovation. I am in a game where I play the leader Ibn Battuta (his increased sight range has great synergy with the Imago Mundi memento), who went from being the leader of Greece, to being the leader of Spain, until ending as the leader of Prussia. You might argue that this makes no sense. But did playing Teddy Roosevelt as the leader of the Americans in Civ 6 from the stone age on make more sense? Having the choice of one leader and three civilizations gives players a lot more choice, and more possible combinations, than just playing one leader tied to a civilization from start to end.

Where Civilization VII has arguably less choice than its predecessors is in map creation. The map of my world at the start of the third age looks like this (I'm playing green): 

The right continent is where I started, and the left continent was where much of the Exploration age happened. The Exploration age *needs* this second continent of roughly similar size, which is why Civilization VII can't possibly have a pangea map. You can get maps with or without those little islands between the continents, and you can have continents that are more fractal and thus have more coastline. But even something like a map of Earth would be difficult in Civ7, as the European/Asian/African connected landmass is so much bigger than America. You will also notice that neither me nor the AI opponents tend to have connected empires, and that isn't just because of the way I played the game. The game mechanics, especially the settlement limit, make it better to cherry pick the best locations all over the map, rather than keeping all of your settlements close together.

Some gameplay mechanics in Civilization VII aren't great, for example the Whac-A-Mole system of converting cities with missionaries back and forth. Now that is a system they took from Civ 6, rather than improving upon it in Civ 7. Being the dominant religion also gives surprisingly little rewards, and ignoring religion gives surprisingly few penalties, which seems strange for a historical 4X game. The crisis system in Millennia is a lot better than that in Civ 7, and religion is a lot more impactful there.

Where Civilization VII shines is keeping the game interesting for longer. I already mentioned in a previous post that the Exploration age basically doubles the fun phase of the game where you go out and explore the world. Not everybody loves the age resets, but I think the opportunity to play a fresh civilization with different bonuses in a fresh age with different goals keeps me motivated much longer than was the case in previous games of the series.

Another highlight of Civilization VII is the new combat system. The Civilization series experimented with this over time, going from doom stacks to one unit per tile rules. Civ 7 makes a compromise here, allowing you to bundle up your armies into stacks for transport, but having to unpack them for combat. That works well. Really well. Maybe too well? Basically the new system gives the player a huge advantage over the AI, because players are so much better at strategic movement than AI is in any 4X games. To the fear mongers who keep telling me that AI is going to take all of our jobs, I would like again to point out that we as humanity are apparently unable to develop an AI that can play a game of Civilization reasonably well. And most of our jobs are more complicated and less forgiving of errors than a game of Civilization. And yes, I know that there are very different systems of AI, but even ChatGPT can't play Civilization. The development of an AI that can produce text and images nearly like a human can, by imitation of humans, and with no guarantee of correctness, only threatens the job of people who create meaningless derivative text and images with no guarantee of correctness. Being able to convincingly sound like an expert isn't a replacement for actual expertise, nor for actual creativity. But please, game designers of the world, please use the advances of AI technology in the world to make better AI for your games, I'm begging you!

Having said that, the AI of Civilization VII is quite good as long as you are outside of warfare and combat. Of course part of that is by simply cheating, getting more resources out of the same situation than a player would. But the AI is pretty good at expanding aggressively and building up its cities. The latter probably because unlike the player it isn't hindered by the UI.

In summary, Civilization VII certainly has flaws and isn't the best 4X game ever. But Civilization VII has a lot of innovation, and the fundamentals of gameplay are really solid and promise a lot of fun and replayability. And many of the flaws look as it they will be fixable over the coming months. I fully understand people who prefer a game fully matured and with 8 years of improvements and added content over its successor. But I am pretty certain than in a year or two the concurrent player numbers of Civ 7 will be higher than those of Civ 6. And for some people, like me, Civilization VII is already the better game than it predecessor.

The first technology you need in the Exploration age is Cartography, which allows all civilian and support units to enter deep ocean tiles. They take up to 20 damage per deep ocean tile, but on a continents+ map you should be able to travel not more than 5 deep ocean tiles and make it to the coastal tiles of the islands between the continents. Note that scouting in Civ7 is extremely powerful, so once you have the Imago Mundis memento, you can already find good pathways to the islands in the Antiquity age by using the scout's Search action on the eastern or western shores of the starting continent. On a map without islands, it might be possible to overcome the deep ocean early by researching astronomy and researching a fleet commander. You can then go 5 deep ocean tiles with the fleet commander, which will damage him, but not the ships he has packed, and then unpack and do the rest of the way with the still undamaged ships. You just need to hope that the new world isn't more than 10 tiles away. :) And then you'll need to find an independent in the new world and use diplomacy to turn him into a city, as you can't cross a large gap with anything but ships.

A regular infantry, cavalry, or ranged unit cannot enter deep ocean tiles until you have the mastery extension of Shipbuilding researched, which is half way down the research tree. However, an army commander with 4 infantry, cavalry, and ranged units packed inside counts as a support unit, and only needs Cartography to cross deep oceans. So an early military conquest of the new world is possible, if there aren't more than 5 deep ocean tiles to cross. Still, being good at science and getting shipbuilding as fast as possible is a huge bonus for the Exploration age.

The other big new factor in the Exploration age is religion. You will want to rush to the Piety civic as fast as possible and found a religion. Then you can build temples, which allow you to build missionaries, which allow you to convert cities. If you send a missionary to any built-up district in a city (yours or others) that doesn't have any religion yet, he will spend one of his charges to convert both the urban and the rural population to your faith. If the city already has a religion, you will need to convert twice: Once in a rural district, and once in an urban district. There are two little round icons under the city name telling you the conversion status, but the game isn't explaining all this very well.

When founding a religion early, I think that the founder belief "Interfaith Dialogue" is very powerful, as it gives you +4 science for every foreign settlement following your religion. This is hard to follow, as the UI is horrible, and on the starting continent you might need to constantly send out new missionaries to keep settlements converted to your side. But the science boost helps with getting to shipbuilding early, and nearly all age progress is tied to that.

If you dislike religion, you can somewhat ignore it, but as this is called the Exploration age, you can't ignore the exploration of the second continent. The units you want to send to the new world early are thus ships (you start with one cog), scouts, settlers, missionaries, and army commanders.And you will want to do all this as early and as aggressively as possible. If you wait until shipbuilding, the age will be half over before you can even start gathering your first legacy point.

What I tried twice at different difficulty levels was to play Confucius with the Han on a small map. With "small" being actually the medium setting, as there are only tiny, small, and standard map sizes. But Confucius is an expansionist scientist, not a military power. And it turns out that if you don't want to have to fight a lot, you need a standard map size. The AI is pretty good at expanding, and an a small map you quickly get massive diplomatic penalties for settling too close to the others, at which point warfare becomes the only option. On the third run I played a mostly peaceful Confucius on a standard map, and managed to grab a decent chunk of the first continent without upsetting my neighbors too much. I would recommend standard map size if you plan on a peaceful strategy, and small if you prefer war.

What has to be added here is that playing peacefully is significantly harder than warfare. The AI is pretty good at expanding their empires, building up cities, and gathering resources. At higher difficulty levels, keeping up with the Joneses is a real challenge. The tactical AI for warfare is much less good. It isn't totally abysmal, but as player you can do some pretty nifty things with your commanders, and the AI isn't really good at that. I defended cities with a single slinger against bigger armies, because the AI can't master the use of the commander to get a lot of melee units next to the city walls quickly. Also the AI, after not making much progress in their wars and taking a lot of losses, is often quite willing to make peace after 10 rounds, even throwing in a small city as gift.

In summary, my advice would be that if you want to do a lot of warfare, go for a small map and higher difficulty level. For peaceful strategies the standard map and maybe one notch less in difficulty might be the better option.

Besides some simply bizarre design decisions, like the map sizes being tiny, small, and standard, with no larger options, the problems of Civ7 are simply in the comparison with Civ6. The new game is easier, more accessible, with menus designed for console players. The game gives out a lot less information, so as to not scare new players, but that annoys the veterans. And Civilization VII is poaching on the grounds of its competitors like Humankind or Millenia by letting the player play not one civilization from start to finish, but having eras forcing you to change civilizations. Thus if you start with Benjamin Franklin, you'll not play the Americans, but might start with something weird like the Han empire, with America only becoming available in the third age.

If the label on the can didn't say Civilization VII, the game would be perfectly fine. It doesn't make me want to uninstall Millennia and Age of Wonders 4, but I sure like it better than Ara: History Untold. Civ 7 could use a couple of quality of life UI upgrades, and more civilization and leader choices, but that is exactly what the patches and DLCs are promising. The technical state of the game is fine for an early access game. The Metacritic critics' score of Civilization is 81%, which is a lot closer to the reality than 40%.

In the last few years, we were able to observe an interesting phenomenon: Typical indicators of the economy were looking good, but the average person was clearly suffering and unhappy from the economic situation. One explanation for this phenomenon is inequality: An economy can grow in a way which makes billionaires richer while simultaneously make the average person poorer. And an important factor contributing to inequality is globalisation, because it makes capital more mobile than labor.

Now imagine a global trade war, which makes it less viable for the rich to profit from cheap labor in China and elsewhere. That would certainly be bad for economic indicators like GDP. But it would also strengthen labor comparatively to capital, and make a larger part of the spoils of economic activity go to the workers, thus reducing inequality. We could see the reverse of the current situation, where the headline numbers and stock market valuations are down, but the typical person is economically better off.

Eliminating the de minimis execption makes a lot of sense for a country that wants to control foreign trade with tariffs. Europe has a similar exception, and is also thinking about eliminating it. If you have millions of small packages every day which you don’t control, there is a lot of cheating going on: In extremis some of these packages actually contain the fentanyl Trump says he wants to stop. But more likely is cheating about the value of goods, or sending goods that don’t comply with various safety regulations and consumer protection rules. One can easily imagine a country with good governance eliminating the control exception for small parcels with a few months of advance warning, while simultaneously hiring a lot of custom inspectors. Doing it without warning and no additional personnel is going to cause a state of utter chaos.

Working as intended is another consequence: A big hit on companies like Temu and Shein, who built their whole business model on this de minimis shipping exception. The same is true for every small drop shipper. Sending small parcels half way around the world isn’t inherently efficient, and only makes sense with that customs exception.

I pre-purchased DLCs for Age of Wonders 4 and Millennia, and didn't regret that. They were reasonable spaced from the game's release, and added fresh content some time after having "finished" the main game. It also felt as if, by spending money on the DLC, I was financing the continued development of games I like, and was contributing to the developers of these games still being paid after release. Civilization VII feels different. There is no way that somebody is actually coding the content of the DLCs between the game's release in February and the DLC release in March. The DLCs are clearly already finished. And they include "new civilizations" like Great Britain, which one could reasonably have assumed to be contained in the main game. In short, it feels as if they cut out a part of the already existing Civ VII game, and are offering you that part for extra money. The Deluxe Edition I bought is actually a standard edition, while what they are selling as Standard Edition is a crippled version. That makes me happy to have gone for the Deluxe Edition in the first place, but I now need to consider that the price to play a non-cut version of Civ VII is €100. None of my extra €30 is keeping a game developer employed while he is creating a DLC, the work is already done, and the money goes straight to the top. It is a bit like a sort of shrinkflation, where what was previously the regular size of the package is now being sold as the extra luxury size for extra money, while the regular size has gotten smaller than it used to be.

The amount of data on the internet is estimated to be in the zettabytes. It is easy to see why it did cost OpenAI a lot of money to grab a good chunk of that, copyrighted or not, and turn it into a much smaller data volume in their AI model. And it is equally easy to see how Deepseek would spend a lot less money on training their AI model, if they used the already "distilled" OpenAI data instead of the raw data.

That ends us with a bit of a moral dilemma: If it is legal to just grab the distilled data from somebody else, then soon everybody will just do that, and nobody will want to do the hard, expensive, and not valued work of sifting through the raw data. So at some point all AI chatbots would be stuck with the knowledge of 2025, because nobody wanted to waste all the money to gather the newer knowledge. But if we say that a company like OpenAI can gather copyrighted data for free and then has copyright on the distilled data and can monetize the data, we are basically giving them a license to steal stuff and resell it.

That completely changed my perspective about Eternal Strands. It went from "looks interesting, but not something I would buy" to "looks interesting, I should try it out". I don't know yet how much Eternal Strands will cost on Stream, it is still 3 hours until release, but it will probably be something like €40+. Action games have the disadvantage that it is harder to judge from watching a stream how well I would be able to play them. So, being uncertain about my ability to play it, and the game being slightly out of my comfort zone, it is unlikely that I would have bought it on Steam. But I am thinking that beyond "saving" €40 by playing Eternal Strands on Game Pass, there is some added value here by being able to try a game outside my comfort zone without risk. Game Pass makes me play games I otherwise wouldn't have. And there is some value to that, even if in a few hours I find out that I don't like Eternal Strands.

We just finished our campaign of Familiar Tales after about 10 sessions. The game has 9 chapters, and one can usually play one chapter in one session, but we had some shorter sessions. Yesterday we played a chapter and a half, because we wanted to finish it. For adult gamers with some experience in role playing and board games, Familiar Tales is possibly a bit too long. And only the final boss fight was even remotely challenging. What kept us playing was the great storytelling, with fantastic characters, all told with great voice acting over the Familiartalesgame.com web app, and that in several languages.

On the gameplay side, Familiar Tales wasn't that great for us. The combat and skill system is simple, and doesn't get any more interesting over the course of the game. Because the game was too easy for us, and because the low price tag limited the number of cards Plaid Hat Games could put in the box, we always bought all the items and all the skill cards long before we reached the end of each era, which made character progression less interesting. So, ultimately I would mostly recommend Familiar Tales as a game to play with kids. As a first campaign board game for children, this is fantastic. For experienced players it doesn't really offer enough, even if the story is great.

I just spent some time sorting all the cards and resetting my copy of Familiar Tales so it could be played again. That felt like a complete waste of time. I don't think I'll ever play it again. But it would feel equally bad to chuck a played board game into the bin. The opportunities to sell used board games in the region I now live in are very limited, especially for games that are in English, and not the local languages.

If you use the internet at all, you probably have been bombarded over decades by various ads for software products to increase your internet security: Antivirus software, VPNs, data-deletion services, the lot. To me, many of these paid internet security services have always seemed overpriced and useless. The built-in antivirus of Microsoft Windows works just fine, and the really sensitive data like credit card and bank transactions I do over the internet are rather well secured by tools provided by the bank. Yes, identity theft and similar crimes are a problem, but paying somebody a hundred bucks or more per year for some sort of software protection isn't actually reducing your risk by very much.

The fundamental truth here is that most of us are rather boring. If the darkest secret your PC can tell about you is that you occasionally watch porn, and you aren't working in any capacity that is sensitive for national security, the Chinese government probably has very little use for your secrets. We are being spied upon all the time by corporations, but the information that they after is stuff like that you are currently considering buying a lawn mower, so they can bombard you with lawn mower ads. Yes, that can feel intrusive if you looked up lawn mowers at one point in time on one website, and then suddenly see lots of targeted ads on other sites later. But it isn't as if you actually lost something by somebody having collected that data. And one could argue that if you weren't bombarded by targeted lawn mower ads, you'd be bombarded by untargeted ads for other things you have less use for.

In 2015, in one of the most wide-spread leaks of embarrassing personal data, hackers published the customer details of Ashley Madison, an online dating service for extramarital affairs. So, yes, if you are doing things online that you don't want anybody to find out about, there is a risk. However, the data leak was possible due to the company running Ashley Madison storing those customer data not very securely. A customer of theirs could have spent a pile of money on various online data protection tools, and the outcome would still have been the same, as it wasn't the customer's computer that got hacked.

The biggest risk on social media is oversharing. In November 2024 tech YouTube influencer Marques Brownlee posted a video of himself testing an action camera, and in the process filmed himself driving a sports car at 95 miles per hour in a 35 miles per hour speed limit zone. There isn't any data protection software out there that can protect anyone from that sort of stupidity. And the Chinese government doesn't have to own Google / Youtube to access that sort of embarrassing information.

There is a serious discussion to be had on whether it would be good to follow the Australian example and ban social media usage under the age of 16. For matters of national security it would maybe be wise to ban all personnel with a certain security clearance from social media in general. But it seems to me that the huge amount of data that is being collected from us via everything from search engines to social media sites is mostly of commercial interest, and has very little to do with national security.

The problem with Root is that there are only very few rules that actually apply to all players. Instead, every player plays a highly asymmetric faction, with its own rules, own strategy, and own path to victory. Unless you know *every* faction very well (and expansions added a lot of factions), and you know the strategy of every faction, and how they would win the game, you can't even tell in an ongoing game of Root who is currently winning. And it isn't that easy to know how you would stop somebody from winning, because sometimes just trying to advance your own position can help another player more than it helps you. The only general strategy advice for Root is: Don't look like you are winning, so other players don't gang up on you, then win with a surprise dash for victory.

Basically, in Root there are 4 players, each playing a very different game, and the 4 games occasionally overlap. You need to learn the rules of all 4 games. Or all 8, if you are playing with all expansions. You might even want to consider all 70 possible combinations of 4 different factions out of 8, if you want to optimize your strategy. The one thing that is certain is that if you only understand the faction you are playing, and only concentrate on advancing that one faction, you'll probably lose the game.

I can see the interest in such a game, but to me it appears very hard to get into. There is a video game version of Root on Steam and mobile, where playing through various factions to learn them seem feasible. But in real life, a 4-player game of Root can go well beyond 2 hours, and the number of games you'd need to play before being truly proficient with all factions is staggering. I do like some asymmetry in board games, but in Root it might simply be too much.