Some more thoughts on Civ 7
Jun. 3, 2025
It’s been about 5 months now since the release of Civilisation VII and it’s starting to become a playable game. This is partly due to me getting used to it and partly the effect of quality of life patches and additional features.
There’s been a few complaints about the game being released unfinished and others about the game being too much of a leap onward from Civ VI. But I think the issue really is that while Civ VI ended up as a massive leap forward from Civ V, it didn’t really start out that way. The things that really improved upon Civ V were added to VI very gradually, both in the form of patches and as the additional iterations of the game: “Rise and Fall” and “Gathering Storm”.
After a few months it feels more like the developers have given us the whole kit and kaboodle straight out of the gate. It’s quite a different game and I think was a bit of a culture shock to a lot of players. But there’s definitely a real, true Civ heart beating inside it. It’s funny, it’s serious, and it’s an absorbing way to spend your time. There’s lots of replayability and it looks gorgeous. It will look even better once they improve the UI, or give us mods on the Steam Workshop.
My remaining wish list is as follows:
- PINS Please give me pins! I now know the game well enough to want to plan things out a bit when the game starts. (Also, they stopped the AI from massively forward settling you. When this was happening, you didn’t need pins to plan cities: you needed troops to plan wars.)
- Some measure of how many troops the AI has Speaking of troops, it would be super-great if we could know how many troops the AI has. Sure, espionage and scouting lets you do this, but in Civ VI there was a number in the HUD.
- “Smooth mode” I can turn off the crises, but I wouldn’t do that if the age transition were smoother. For me, the transition adds nothing to the game, and I’d like to try it with the crises on and the transitions disabled please and thankyou.
- Better city states The bonuses from city states are great, but I don’t like that you can’t flip their allegiance anymore. Playing as Tecumseh and grabbing all the city states is super fun, though it feels like cheating. I’m okay with them going back to the Civ V model of city states, although I did really love their (relative) autonomy in Civ VI. I also love how aggressive some of them are in Civ VII!
- Ability to turn off victory types and legacy paths I say this only because the culture path in the modern age is so utterly irritating and broken that I almost don’t want to play the final third of the game sometimes.
The content of the next patch looks good. I’m looking forward to the Steam Workshop mods and the city state tweaks in particular.
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