www.Tobold.com
Tobold@GMail.com
A blog with my thoughts regarding games I am playing and other stuff in life. Please read my Terms of Service
RSS Feed
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Civilization VII advantages and disadvantages
I just spent €30 to upgrade my Deluxe edition of Civilization VII to a Founder's edition, basically pre-purchasing the DLCs that will come out between April and September of this year. You can conclude from that, that I think Civ7 is worth €130. I like the game, I like it much more than Civ6, and I have already played it more in a week than I played Civ6 in 8 years. But that is my opinion, and it isn't shared by everybody. As I write this, the number of players online playing Civ 6 is about the same as those playing Civ 7, and the peak concurrent players of Civ 7 is half the Civ6 number. That isn't a great launch by any metrics. In this post, I want to list what is currently wrong with Civilization VII, but also what the game does well.
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.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:55 AM Permanent Link
Comments:
<< Home
Newer› ‹Older
I started the Civ series with Civ2. Loved it. Enough so that I went back and bought the original Civ to play it also. Loved it too, though played Civ2 more. Civ 3 came out and I loved it also, but I played it to the point where I got fairly burned out on any 4X game, not jut Civ series. When Civ4 came out the initial word of mouht was that it was "ok" but that Civ3 was "better," so I never ended up buying nor playing that one. I had Alpha Centauri and its expansion in there and liked them a lot, but stil preferred the main series to AC.
The change to the hex tiles in Civ5 and the reduction to 1 unit per tile sounded interesting to me, so I got that one and enjoyed it over 2,000 hours worth, according to Steam. I even bought "Beyond Earth" and have about 300 hours of that also. Civ6 sounded like it would be a straight up improvement to Civ5 so I bought it on launch day and started in.
As I recall it, I actually didn't like it much at 1st, but when I went back to Civ5 I realized that 6 had features I didn't even realize it had that I missed, so back to 6 I went. I liked the base game pretty well, but the 1st expansion with its loyalty mechanic (among other things) felt like a downgrade to me, so I played it a lot less afterward. The 2nd expansion felt like a massive downgrade to me and I stopped playing the game very shortly after installing that.
With Civ7 coming out and saying it's shaking things up, I thought I'd give it a look, but reading the articles and blogs and such about it.... I think I may just got back to Stellaris and Endless Legend. Civ7's consensus seems to be "framework looks promising, but it's completely unfinished right now." Perhaps in a few month or a year I'll give it another look, but from how it sounds right now, I'm giving it a pass.
The change to the hex tiles in Civ5 and the reduction to 1 unit per tile sounded interesting to me, so I got that one and enjoyed it over 2,000 hours worth, according to Steam. I even bought "Beyond Earth" and have about 300 hours of that also. Civ6 sounded like it would be a straight up improvement to Civ5 so I bought it on launch day and started in.
As I recall it, I actually didn't like it much at 1st, but when I went back to Civ5 I realized that 6 had features I didn't even realize it had that I missed, so back to 6 I went. I liked the base game pretty well, but the 1st expansion with its loyalty mechanic (among other things) felt like a downgrade to me, so I played it a lot less afterward. The 2nd expansion felt like a massive downgrade to me and I stopped playing the game very shortly after installing that.
With Civ7 coming out and saying it's shaking things up, I thought I'd give it a look, but reading the articles and blogs and such about it.... I think I may just got back to Stellaris and Endless Legend. Civ7's consensus seems to be "framework looks promising, but it's completely unfinished right now." Perhaps in a few month or a year I'll give it another look, but from how it sounds right now, I'm giving it a pass.
Civ7's consensus seems to be "framework looks promising, but it's completely unfinished right now."
I wouldn't disagree with that summary. Except maybe with the "completely". Civ 7 is noticeably unfinished, but not so unfinished that you wouldn't be able to play it.
I wouldn't disagree with that summary. Except maybe with the "completely". Civ 7 is noticeably unfinished, but not so unfinished that you wouldn't be able to play it.
"... humanity are apparently unable to develop an AI that can play a game of Civilization reasonably well."
It's not that we can't, it's that game developers are years behind in taking advantage of modern AI know-how. And probably unwilling to research/spend on it at the level it would take. DeepMind, a tech firm owned by Google's parent company, created the AI called AlphaStar that played StarCraft II at an exceptionally high level. But AlphaStar was developed by a team of over 40 academic researchers at DeepMind. Stracraft is a complex, fast real-time game, and if you could manage that with AI of several years ago, making very strong Civ7 AI if properly motivated & financed would be trivial by comparison. Then again, I don't know how fun it would be to get destroyed by it repeatedly. But it would be nice to have that option, and top players to actually have a challenging AI opponent.
It's not that we can't, it's that game developers are years behind in taking advantage of modern AI know-how. And probably unwilling to research/spend on it at the level it would take. DeepMind, a tech firm owned by Google's parent company, created the AI called AlphaStar that played StarCraft II at an exceptionally high level. But AlphaStar was developed by a team of over 40 academic researchers at DeepMind. Stracraft is a complex, fast real-time game, and if you could manage that with AI of several years ago, making very strong Civ7 AI if properly motivated & financed would be trivial by comparison. Then again, I don't know how fun it would be to get destroyed by it repeatedly. But it would be nice to have that option, and top players to actually have a challenging AI opponent.
And to add to what Perkus said, there are now AIs that have learned to play Chess and Go at a superhuman level without even playing a game against humans - just practicing against themselves.
But back to Civ 7, the cities scattered all over the map suggest to me that the game had little in the way of combat, good or bad. It's hard for me to see how combat of the kind in Civs would result in such a configuration. Surelay some kind of front lines and defensible empires would have to form?
But back to Civ 7, the cities scattered all over the map suggest to me that the game had little in the way of combat, good or bad. It's hard for me to see how combat of the kind in Civs would result in such a configuration. Surelay some kind of front lines and defensible empires would have to form?
The commanders make warfare more mobile. And the settlement limit makes it so, that you voluntarily pass by a minor enemy city in order to capture a juicier target behind. And even more scattering is caused by the AI being willing to offer you some faraway city in a peace deal.
I'm going to make a guess as to what happened. I'd be willing to bet 100 Euros from Tobold's wallet that most of the unfinished items (UI, large map, scout auto-explore, etc.) were planned for the initial release and that they were on schedule to do the work. Then Meta appears, gives 2K a boatload of cash to release a VR version, and suddenly the planned items are all out the window.
This is an Occam's Razor play - it's the simplest explanation for what otherwise seems to be bizarre behavior. Compromising the game for Meta money isn't in character with Firaxis, but it certainly is for 2K.
Post a Comment
This is an Occam's Razor play - it's the simplest explanation for what otherwise seems to be bizarre behavior. Compromising the game for Meta money isn't in character with Firaxis, but it certainly is for 2K.
<< Home
