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Monday, February 24, 2025
Epic Civilization
After playing several games of Civilization VII on standard game speed, I had the impression that ages frequently finished before I was ready for them to end. So I tried changing the game speed from standard to epic. That turned out to be the wrong parameter (there is an advanced parameter that slows down or speeds up age progression), but it was still an interesting game.
Civ 7 has 5 possible game speeds: Online, quick, standard, epic, and marathon. What this parameter does is mainly changing the cost to produce anything. Online halves the cost, while marathon makes the cost three times higher. So if for example on standard it would take a given city 6 turns to build a settler, at online speed it takes only 3 turns, while at marathon speed it takes 18. Other costs, for example influence costs for diplomatic actions, scale the same way.
Now at first glance that seems like a parameter which only speeds up or slows down your game. Until you realize that movement isn't affected by the game speed parameter. If on standard speed it took you 6 turns to build a settler, and another 5 turns for the settler to reach the spot where you want to build a new city, it will still take the settler 5 turns from the same city to the same build spot at any other game speed. Playing at epic speed, the settler now took 10 turns to build, but still reached his destination in 5 turns. In relative terms, that speeds up unit movement. It makes everything that is related to movement, from settling, to waging wars, to getting treasure fleets home faster, relatively speaking.
That had some weird side effects: In my game the random map generator had created the second continent a bit smaller than the first one. So, in spite of the first continent holding 5 civilizations and the second continent holding only 3, by the time I arrived at the new continent in the exploration age, it was already nearly completely settled. Imagine an alternative history of earth where the Aztecs send out exploration and colonization ships in 1519, land in Spain, and find the continent already too densely settled and developed for any colonization to take place. Not every epic or marathon game will go like that, there were other factors like Xerxes with his higher city limit living on the second continent. But with my epic game speed slowing down production, exploration and settling for the AI had been sped up relatively to my speed of getting to the new world.
I have now played over 100 hours of Civ 7, but there are things that are getting repetitive. While different AI leaders and civilizations in some respects behave differently, in other respects all AI takes the same decisions in every game. For example, if you are the second player who reached the mysticism civic and get to choose a parthenon, you'll find that the first AI player always took fertility. In the exploration age, the AI opponents are always slow to found a religion and send out missionaries, so the beliefs that give you science for converting foreign cities, and relics for converting new world cities, are completely overpowered. I would have wished that certain AI leaders would have a different focus. In the modern age, you can always rush explorers and get to a cultural victory quickly. You basically need to deliberately play sub-optimally, or all of your games progress in very similar ways after the antiquity age.
It would be wise for me to stop playing Civ 7 now, and wait a few balance patches and DLCs to change things. But I did that for Civ 6 after 40 hours, and then never restarted. Once I stop playing a game and play something else, it is often very hard to find the motivation to return. So I think I'll still play a few games and try some other game parameters, like longer ages, or a fractal map.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:51 AM Permanent Link
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Thanks for your Civ7 updates, I find them very interesting. In many ways, it's a shame to play these complex but underbaked games only on release, when they're at their worst, rather than in a year or two when they've become much better experiences. I buy the vast majority of my games well beyond their release date, sometimes decades later. At least I know it's been thoroughly debugged and tweaked by then for an optimal experience.
As I've been muddling my way through my play throughs, I've found the youtube channel "One More Turn" to be enormously helpful, particularly two videos - one on resource and district adjacency, and the second on the first ten turns, where he plays the same start with science, food, and production biases.
Strangely enough, I've been having much more fun with another Firaxis game, one I had not expected - XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. I'm not a TRPG person, but I happened on Christopher Odd's Youtube channel, where he and his community have assembled 555 mods (!) to create, if not XCOM 3, at least XCOM 2.5. Odd has done this for nine seasons, testing and polishing the experience, and while I started with it on as background viewing while I did other things, I eventually downloaded the mod sets and am thoroughly enjoying it. It's worth a watch and possibly more.
If anything, the care, polish, and balance really contrasts with Civ VII. The new systems are different enough that they require more than just polish - they require new metrics for management and visualization for items such as adjacency and trading range. It's both ironic and a tragedy that charging extra for advanced access will probably end up costing 2K and Firaxis much more than they made than if they'd sold it at a standard price in Early Access for six months and then rolled it out to more acclaim.
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Strangely enough, I've been having much more fun with another Firaxis game, one I had not expected - XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. I'm not a TRPG person, but I happened on Christopher Odd's Youtube channel, where he and his community have assembled 555 mods (!) to create, if not XCOM 3, at least XCOM 2.5. Odd has done this for nine seasons, testing and polishing the experience, and while I started with it on as background viewing while I did other things, I eventually downloaded the mod sets and am thoroughly enjoying it. It's worth a watch and possibly more.
If anything, the care, polish, and balance really contrasts with Civ VII. The new systems are different enough that they require more than just polish - they require new metrics for management and visualization for items such as adjacency and trading range. It's both ironic and a tragedy that charging extra for advanced access will probably end up costing 2K and Firaxis much more than they made than if they'd sold it at a standard price in Early Access for six months and then rolled it out to more acclaim.
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