Feb. 11, 2025
Sid Meier’s Civilization VII is out today to much fanfare. After spending what top scientists are calling “far too long” playing Civ VI and a couple of run-throughs of the new game during the early access period, here are some thoughts on the new instalment.
Civ games are rarely finished on day 1. Civ V was not really the game I came to know and love until its third DLC. Civ VI kept breaking, including a memorable “every resource becomes bananas” bug in Mac multiplayer. It’s improved at a pretty consistent rate over its long lifespan, both from the DLC and modding perspective. In some ways, Civ VI remains unfinished for Mac players as a game-breaking bug was introduced in the last six months that has still not been fixed.
So it’s no surprise that Civ VII comes with a few bits missing. For us chez mattischrome, the big miss is a team mode in multiplayer so that Ingrid and I can play co-operatively. But the thing that feels least finished of all is the user interface, which brings me to my next point…
When you buy units there’s no audio or visual feedback to let you know you’ve done that. It’s difficult to select units. It’s hard to see what’s going on in your cities. It’s hard to make informed choices about what’s going on.
Of course, what gave Civ VI great UI in the end was the modding community, so even if the developers don’t address all of the problems with the UI, perhaps the modders will? Unfortunately, I’m hearing rumours that the scripting engine is now in JavaScript rather than Lua, which may mean the mods take a bit longer to come online.
I’ve not played enough to know this for certain but I have played a game at each extreme of the difficulty levels. On extremely easy mode, the AI did not seem to know what it was doing at all but I guess that is the point of that difficulty level. I played at that level so I could explore the new mechanics without having to worry too much about the AI. After about 50 turns in that game, the AI was irrelevant.
On the hardest difficulty level, it did seem like the AI was relatively robust. I do feel that a lot of the changes to the game are designed to make it easier for the AI to schedule its progress through the tech trees. The building placement is less complex and so it should be easier for the AI to make similar decisions to human players.
There have been so many comments online from culture war grifters about how upset they are that they can’t play as America or whatever for the whole flipping game. The de-coupling of leaders from civs has also caused much gnashing of teeth about the so-called lack of historical accuracy. If you want historical accuracy, maybe watch a documentary?
It’s always been a problem in recent civ games that early eras are difficult if your bonuses come too late, and the later eras are a bit dull if you miss your moment when you have an early bonus. So I welcome the chance to reset my civilisation’s capabilities part way through and the chance to pivot my abilities if the game hasn’t gone the way I planned. The earlier caveats about not having played very many games yet still applies though. In the worst case scenario, you can always stick to a particular favourite combo throughout your first few games and then experiment with peeling away from that in subsequent games.
I really don’t the division of the game into three parts. Which is kind of weird when I’ve just said that I quite like the ability to change your civilisation. In the ideal world, I think I would prefer to unlock the civilisation change, but not to have the whole game just stop. It makes Civ feel like a game with levels, and for me the most appealing aspect of Civ is its open-endedness. I love games where you just sprawl out all over the map because you can (because you Genghis Khan…) but I get the feeling from the games I have played so far that this mechanic really going to impinge on that fun.
It’s quite immersion breaking, but I might like it more when I am playing more difficult opponents because it might offer the chance to reset the game.
In the build up to the announcement of Civ VII, Firaxis released lots of content about previous civ games, including the famous “eternal war” game from Civ II that a reddit user posted about in which a long-running game had descended into an awkward post-nuclear rock-paper-scissors hellscape dominated by three factions. Obviously Firaxis wants us to be able to tell stories with Civ VII that are just as epic, but it doesn’t seem possible when the game is (at the moment) more like a puzzle game with levels.