Sid Meier’s Civilization VII

[wonderpug]

I'm enjoying the game, but right now my biggest complaint is combat involving my own units happening off-screen when it happens on computer turns. I often have no idea I've lost a scout, or that one of my armies has been attacked. The start-of-turn notifications list doesn't even give a summary of your units that got destroyed.

There should be a notification in that stack of icons that pop up on the left side of the screen, just above the command dohickie. One of my scout units just sacrificed themselves to provide an example. If you click on the icon, it will zoom the map to where the unit was lost.



Edit: Sorry, I meant the socialist side of the screen.

Hmm, I'll have to look more closely, but I'm on the PS5 and I haven't seen a notification like that. (Entirely possible I wasn't looking in the right place.) When I've brought up the notifications, it's just been weather events or large scale political changes.

[Max Peck]

One thing that I'm not impressed by are the videos that play at the end of each age. They look like placeholder flash animations that were dropped in and then forgotten.

[ydejin]

One thing that I'm not impressed by are the videos that play at the end of each age. They look like placeholder flash animations that were dropped in and then forgotten.

It’s odd. Some of them are fine, but others seem to be the lowest quality artwork in the game. A lot of the other paintings (such as the 4 paintings that walk you through the changes to Civ7 every single game …) seem really nicely done. The end of age paintings turned into videos seem to be literally lower resolution (like low-rez images blown up), they also seem to have less time spent shading, and often don’t feel like their perspective is quite right. It’s very odd.

[msteelers]

I'm playing as Isabella who doubles all yields from working natural wonders, and spawned right next to a multi-tile wonder that gives a bunch of food and culture.

I'm into the exploration age now on this playthrough and feel like a cultural victory would be well in hand, but I did a cultural victory on my last playthrough so I'm trying to pivot towards an economic victory.

[YellowKing]

I hit the Exploration age with my Tecumseh run, and did a hard pivot away from a Militaristic victory. The problem is I became such good friends with the two Civs on my continent I didn't have the heart to turn on them.

So now I'm shooting for a Cultural victory, and dabbling in Religion which I had never done before. I'm determined to finish this game to completion no matter what happens, so even though I'm flailing around a bit right now I'm going to see it through. I REALLY like the Tecumseh/Shawnee DLC. They have come cool special units, and I like the Native American soundtrack.

[Max Peck]

I finished my first full game with a military victory as Napoleon. I started a new game playing Ben Franklin/Greece and am trying to focus on science and diplomacy. I've picked up a half dozen city-states and the race is on to incorporate them as towns before the antiquity age ends. I've managed to stay on good terms with the other civs on my continent, so the only fighting I've been doing was fending off marauding troops for hostile independents prior to converting them to the cause.

[El Guapo]

At the start of the Exploration Age in my first game (Han --> Incas), initially there hasn't been much for me to do. In antiquity I conquered one civ on my home continent (Rome) and reduced the other (Persia) to one city. So not much for me to do on my home continent right now - I could probably take Persia's last city, but I'm already over my settlement cap, so doesn't seem worth it. So basically sitting around building up a couple cities and researching tech to go over there.

One question - are "distant lands" settlements anything that's not on your starting land mass, or is there a minimum distance requirement? There's a small island right off of my starting landmass so curious whether that would count as a distant settlement (doesn't seem colloquially distant but not sure how the game defines it).

[Max Peck]

As I understand it, distant lands are any land that was unreachable in antiquity because it was separated from your continent by deep water.

[YellowKing]

That's my understanding as well, Max Peck.

El Guapo, your "not much for me to do" feeling is how I've felt about every Exploration age I've reached so far. This session is going a bit better because I am working on cultural and religious objectives, but I think the game grinds to a bit of a halt after Antiquity because crossing the ocean is so damn difficult.

While it obviously gets much easier once you've researched Shipbuilding, it's still a slog to get to that point. The Exploration Age early grind is probably my biggest nitpick with the game right now.

[ydejin]

One question - are "distant lands" settlements anything that's not on your starting land mass, or is there a minimum distance requirement? There's a small island right off of my starting landmass so curious whether that would count as a distant settlement (doesn't seem colloquially distant but not sure how the game defines it).

If you go to the map filter that switches yields on and off and toggles settler view on and off, there should also be a setting to show continents. I believe that should also tell you which continents are distant lands with treasure resources. Although this is probably only really important for figuring out what counts for bonus points in the military victory point track. For the economic victory points, I think you can just look to see if there are treasure resources (e.g., Spices) and if there are, you should be good to go.

I haven’t played around with the continents setting at all, but one thing to be aware of is you can have a single land mass marked as multiple continents, which I do find confusing. But that is the way it works in “the real world” with Europe and Asia both being on the same land mass.

[ydejin]

While it obviously gets much easier once you've researched Shipbuilding, it's still a slog to get to that point. The Exploration Age early grind is probably my biggest nitpick with the game right now.

You should be able to start setting out your Carracks across the sea very early on (I think immediately when the age starts, although there might be a first row tech you need to grab). They’ll go across slowly and take water damage any turn they remain in Deep Ocean. If you can find an island (ala the Azores and Canary Islands) you can hold up there and repair your ships — Age of Exploration ships can heal in coastal waters even outside your own territory. If you get really unlucky and can’t find anything before they take too much damage you’ll lose your ships. But you can map out the game equivalent of the Caribbean and know exactly where the best places to settle are, so you’ll know exactly where to go as soon as settlers can cross the Ocean.

I think this works best in Continents Plus mode (which IIRC is the default map mode). Continents Plus adds some islands between continents giving you a Caribbean area. I think Continents (without the Plus) may just give you a big largely impassable sea until you get Shipbuilding.

[Max Peck]

I've only been playing with Continents Plus for now. It looks like it always has 2 large continents plus a smattering of islands, which makes it easier for ships to survive while searching for the new world in the exploration age. I saw something, somewhere about some of the other map options being borked somehow, so I've been sticking with the default.

[El Guapo]

As I understand it, distant lands are any land that was unreachable in antiquity because it was separated from your continent by deep water.

Yeah I had to cross exactly one tile of deep ocean to get to the island in question. The internet (and you) suggests that that is sufficient to mark the island as "distant lands" although it's really not very distant at all.

Looking to plop a settlement down there for the military track, although presumably that's going to make my settlement cap problem worse. Feels like the settlement cap is a significant obstacle to the military track?

[Torfish]

I finished my first game. Took about 13-15 hours. I won with Xerxing on an economic victory. It was on the second easiest difficulty, called Govenor.

Great: The game is optimized very well. Civ 5 and 6 always took a long time processing the turns late game. In 7, I was able to fly through the turns late game. Less than 5-10 seconds per turn on average and I was in three wars. My PC is 4 years old. Zero crashes. I really love the age transitions. I think it adds to the game in fun and strategy. When Civ 6 first came out players felt it was a just a DLC to Civ 5 because there were not enough changes. This game feels like a big leap from 6.

Good: There's a good variety of buildings and units to build. Graphics and sound effects are good. Overall gameplay is good.

Not good: Quests are a big deal and they need to be much better. The last economy quest was the only fun one that I had to do. Some quests are confusing and aren't fun at all. Seem distracting from the way I want to play. Lots of little bugs. The UI needs a complete rework. Missing information causes confusion and results in random button pushing.

This is definitely the base game that needs more hooks for it to become really good. I'm optimistic because of their roadmap and their dedication to the series. I'll stick with it.

[Brian]

Feels like the settlement cap is a significant obstacle to the military track?

Check your Civics research tree.
There are LOTS of increases to your Settlement Cap in there.

[Stefan Stirzaker]

I was going to wait but the forum effect .... I decided i need to buy myself a good 50th b'day present Liking the game over all, some things i haven't liked (the colours for settlers showing good or bad, and the problem when you get closer to a building spot that it then removed the city icon) and some things like the city names disappearing occasionally.

Halfway through my first game as Hatshepsut, got jumped at the end of the first age by confucius and someone else, survived to the end of the age and then we were not at war?

Looking forward to as many hours in this as civ 6/5/4

edit: oh and the continue game loading another save not my most recent save

[Kraken]

Newegg has the basic game for $15 off right now. I'm thinking this might be a good time to buy. I don't want to play it yet but I'm sure I will, eventually, when it reaches sufficient doneness.

So, two questions from a guy who buys like one game per year: Is there any practical reason not to buy a Steam game through Newegg? And, is the price likely to fall below $55 over the next few months?

[ydejin]

Halfway through my first game as Hatshepsut, got jumped at the end of the first age by confucius and someone else, survived to the end of the age and then we were not at war?

Yep. All wars stop at the end of the age. If you check the year list, I think there’s usually around 1000 years between end of the Antiquity Age (which usually stops while you’re still in the BCE’s and the Exploration Age which is basically Middle Ages through the Renaissance). Hopefully this shows up, but this is a screenshot of a page from the Civilopedia someone on the CivFanatics forum took discussing what happens on age transitions:

[Stefan Stirzaker]

Halfway through my first game as Hatshepsut, got jumped at the end of the first age by confucius and someone else, survived to the end of the age and then we were not at war?

Yep. All wars stop at the end of the age. If you check the year list, I think there’s usually around 1000 years between end of the Antiquity Age (which usually stops while you’re still in the BCE’s and the Exploration Age which is basically Middle Ages through the Renaissance). Hopefully this shows up, but this is a screenshot of a page from the Civilopedia someone on the CivFanatics forum took discussing what happens on age transitions:

Cool thanks. Yeah i think i'll use this, 3 or 4 turns before end of an age, blitz a few neighbours and then hopefully capture one or two cities and won't have to deal with rebellion or sadness or ruined infrastructure.

[Torfish]

I had 90% of my gold taken away when the transition happened for the modern age.

[Max Peck]

My Ben Franklin/Shawnee exploration age went kind of sideways. I was able to island hop to the "new world" fairly quickly, but it turned out that the continent was already fully occupied, so my settler spent most of the age futilely searching for a place to plant the flag. I eventually found a little strip of land (1 hex wide by 3 hexes long) wedged between two cities, but it provided me fresh water and some offshore fishing, so it had to do. I also had a ship mapping out the coastline, so I was at least able to scoop up some of the independents.

I was able to complete the science legacy quest, but didn't make much progress on the military and trade legacies due to the lack of opportunity to do much in the "distant lands" without going full conquest. I finished off the exploration age by running out the clock researching/studying future tech and civics, incorporating new world city-states to bring myself up to my settlement cap, and building a few army commanders and a fleet commander since they seem to survive the age transition with a random selection of new age units.

The modern age should be interesting. I'm going with the United States, have retained a fairly large military that I'll probably need given that both continents are tightly packed. I've got a few towns in the new world, but they're all small and hemmed in by the other civs' settlements. There will be blood spilled, even if I constrain myself to defensive wars. The plan is to work toward a science victory, but there will likely be plenty of ways for that to go off the rails.

[The Meal]

This is a really long video, but I found it super helpful. This guy goes through almost every aspect of the game while actually playing and explaining why he's doing what he's doing. A lot of it may be a bit basic to Civ veterans, but the video is well indexed so you can jump around to the subjects that interest you. I thought he did a great job explaining the new features in Civ7 and how they work, as well as providing general strategy tips. He answered a lot of questions I had about how towns and cities work, how assigning resources works, how town specialization works, etc.

This channel has another new strategy video with a focus on settlement development. I’m at work now, so I’m not linking it directly, but I watched the first four segments prior to leaving the house this morning, and it seems really solid.

The updated game UI should make a lot of these findings more available to the player. Fingers crossed we see these improvements by Independence Day.

[YellowKing]

Here's the link to the one Meal's talking about (I assume):

[The Meal]

Thanks, YK. That's it!

[Max Peck]

Welp, things have gone sideways for early modern age Ben Franklin, with 3 different civs all declaring war on me on the same turn. None of them were seriously hostile beforehand, and one of them was in an alliance with me. Glad to see that good relations mean absolutely nothing.

[YellowKing]

I had a stroke of luck. I was flailing miserably in the Exploration Age due to dabbling in religion and wasting many turns before realizing I didn't know WTF I was doing. Halfway in I was falling behind everywhere, not sure what to do. Finally I decided to just send my entire army overseas to my new distant land settlement in the hopes of perhaps resuming my long-stalled Military path.

Then Ibn threw me a lifeline. He asked me to ally with him, so I said sure. He, along with Isabella, had been my main continent buddies since the beginning. Right after the alliance he declared war on Catherine the Great and French dude (forget his name). OH YESSS. The two civs right beside my overseas settlement, the same settlement where I had my entire army parked.

I gladly knocked out Catherine's closest settlement, then turned my attention to Frenchie. At this point I'm about to wreck his world. Even better, my other buddy Isabella also allied with Ibn, so we're now all ganging up on the other two. The important part about all this is that it's racking me up points along the military path, finally allowing me to catch back up and giving me at least a shot at a Military victory.

Things could still go sideways. Both Ibn and Isabella are ahead in other victory pursuits, so while they're helping me out unintentionally, I could also be helping them. But at least I now have a bit of hope and some semblance of direction.

I plan on seeing this session through to the end, but I've already kind of discarded it as another practice round. I want to watch that city video posted above before my next restart, and try to get a better handle on how religion works.

[ydejin]

Welp, things have gone sideways for early modern age Ben Franklin, with 3 different civs all declaring war on me on the same turn. None of them were seriously hostile beforehand, and one of them was in an alliance with me. Glad to see that good relations mean absolutely nothing.

Did they pick different ideology paths (Democracy, Communism, Fascism)? They re-tuned the AI in a patch earlier in the week (if you’re on PC) and greatly increased the odds of starting fights with opposing ideologies. From the patch notes:

* In Modern, AI will now consider Ideology more before Declaring War or offering Peace.
* Other Leaders now have a decreased desire for war if neither party has an Ideology.
* Other Leaders now have an increased desire for war with players of Opposing ideologies.
* Other Leaders now have a decreased desire for Peace with players of opposing Ideologies.

My impression is even if you’ve been a friend all along, if you are now a dirty democrat, dirty communists, dirty fascist there’s still a very high chance they are going to declare war unless they share ideology with them.

[Max Peck]

Welp, things have gone sideways for early modern age Ben Franklin, with 3 different civs all declaring war on me on the same turn. None of them were seriously hostile beforehand, and one of them was in an alliance with me. Glad to see that good relations mean absolutely nothing.

Did they pick different ideology paths (Democracy, Communism, Fascism)? They re-tuned the AI in a patch earlier in the week (if you’re on PC) and greatly increased the odds of starting fights with opposing ideologies. From the patch notes:

* In Modern, AI will now consider Ideology more before Declaring War or offering Peace.
* Other Leaders now have a decreased desire for war if neither party has an Ideology.
* Other Leaders now have an increased desire for war with players of Opposing ideologies.
* Other Leaders now have a decreased desire for Peace with players of opposing Ideologies.

My impression is even if you’ve been a friend all along, if you are now a dirty democrat, dirty communists, dirty fascist there’s still a very high chance they are going to declare war unless they share ideology with them.

I had picked an ideology, but none of the other civs had done so yet. As far as I know "no ideology" isn't an opposing ideology.

I ran into a repeatable crash bug shortly after the War to End All War began, where the game would CTD every time it cycled to give orders to a trader unit I had built, so I reverted to an older save. So far I've managed to avoid doing whatever it was I did to piss off everyone before.

[Max Peck]

[Duplicate post]

[msteelers]

The important part about all this is that it's racking me up points along the military path, finally allowing me to catch back up and giving me at least a shot at a Military victory.

FWIW, I don't think how far you get down the various legacy paths in the Antiquity or Exploration ages have much impact on your ability to get those victory conditions in the Modern age. You get more legacy points, which can certainly be beneficial, but for most victory paths it's not really a requirement that you follow those paths at all in the earlier ages.

I finished my economic victory last night, and I imagine that one is going to be my least favorite. You have to slot factory resources into your cities, and you get 1 point for every factory resource each round. You ultimately need to get 500 of these points, and once you have a factory set up in each town/city there's nothing really for you to do outside of try and prevent other civs from finding artifacts and claiming a cultural victory. Then once you get the 500 points a great merchant is spawned. They can teleport across the map to each civilation's capital and set up a world bank. Once that's done the game is over. So the last 50-60 turns of the game had almost nothing for me to do outside of wait.

My next game I'm shooting for a military victory. I just took the capital from my biggest rival on the starting continent, but my troops are hurting. I think I'm going to have to get a peace treaty going for a few turns to build back up before taking them out.

[Pyperkub]

Newegg has the basic game for $15 off right now. I'm thinking this might be a good time to buy. I don't want to play it yet but I'm sure I will, eventually, when it reaches sufficient doneness.

So, two questions from a guy who buys like one game per year: Is there any practical reason not to buy a Steam game through Newegg? And, is the price likely to fall below $55 over the next few months?

$15 off expired, but they do have a $10 off code for the standard edition only.

[Max Peck]

The important part about all this is that it's racking me up points along the military path, finally allowing me to catch back up and giving me at least a shot at a Military victory.

FWIW, I don't think how far you get down the various legacy paths in the Antiquity or Exploration ages have much impact on your ability to get those victory conditions in the Modern age. You get more legacy points, which can certainly be beneficial, but for most victory paths it's not really a requirement that you follow those paths at all in the earlier ages.

I'd say the most import factor in setting up a successful military victory lies in weakening the competition in the earlier ages. The fewer settlements the other surviving civs have upon reaching the modern age, the less of a threat they will be. Following that strategy will organically progress the military legacy in the ancient age, and to some extent in the exploration age (depending on the degree to which you're active in distant lands), but it's more of a side effect of setting the stage for the modern age victory than an actual requirement.

In my first game, where I was actively pursuing a military victory, the modern age was pretty much a cake walk because the other surviving civs were relatively weak. In my current game, where I've been pursing a science victory and trying to deal with the other civs using diplomacy and as little fighting as possible, trying to switch to a military victory would be much more challenging due to the number and strength of the other civs.

[Max Peck]

I got my science victory tonight, with the "staffed" space flight. I get that they wanted a non-gendered term, but would it have been a lot less awkward to use something more standard, like "crewed" instead of what they chose. It's like nobody on the dev team has paid attention to what people say nowadays instead of "manned" flights. Although I'm sure that term is coming back, because, well, you know...

I actually was in the final stages of the military and economic victories as well. A world war did eventually erupt, but it wasn't the world against me this time, since I had a couple of commie fellow travellers allied with me. The sole democracy came at me, so taking some of their cities dramatically accelerated the military legacy advancement. I also hit a critical mass with railroads, factories and resources, so the economic legacy just rolled along on autopilot. When my spaceship launched and ended the game, I was also building the final project for the military victory and was about half way through setting up the world bank offices.

[Kraken]

I got my science victory tonight, with the "staffed" space flight. I get that they wanted a non-gendered term, but would it have been a lot less awkward to use something more standard, like "crewed" instead of what they chose. It's like nobody on the dev team has paid attention to what people say nowadays instead of "manned" flights. Although I'm sure that term is coming back, because, well, you know...

As a working copy editor, I use and endorse "crewed."

[Kraken]

Newegg has the basic game for $15 off right now. I'm thinking this might be a good time to buy. I don't want to play it yet but I'm sure I will, eventually, when it reaches sufficient doneness.

So, two questions from a guy who buys like one game per year: Is there any practical reason not to buy a Steam game through Newegg? And, is the price likely to fall below $55 over the next few months?

$15 off expired, but they do have a $10 off code for the standard edition only.

Yeah I dithered too long. Story of my life. I'm distracted enough by Humankind that I want o spend a few hours figuring out this Civ/not-Civ game. I might keep picking at it until I understand it, but it's not drawing me in. It's obvious where Firaxis "borrowed" for Civ7, though. Sid Meier didn't suddenly have a radical idea.

[Pyperkub]

I actually grabbed it and got a couple of hours in today. I think that's more than I played 5 or 6.

Having fun so far, tho I really haven't got a good grasp of it yet, going in pretty cold

[Max Peck]

I finished a couple of games and did find the moment-to-moment gameplay to be pretty good, and even with all the weird deficiencies it still has a strong one-more-turn vibe going for it. I know that we're supposed to cut them slack because this is the initial release and it always takes a few patches and expansions to arrive at a full-featured Civ game, yadda yadda yadda, but really? This is the 7th game in the series, so they should be nailing things like UI/UIX right out of the gate. It's far from their first time at the rodeo.

I kind of want to fire up a game of Ara and compare the gameplay to Civ 7 now that it's out. I think I might actually prefer Ara to Civ, but I'd want to refresh my impression of the game to be sure about. However, next up is Avowed so the head-to-head comparison will have to wait.

Incidentally, the numerous CTDs I had were probably not actually bugs in the game. While troubleshooting a problem that cropped up yesterday morning, I discovered that the motherboard was running an older BIOS version that didn't include the final round of Intel Raptor Lake microcode fixes. I flashed the latest BIOS yesterday, which seems to have fixed the problem. I played Civ for several hours last night with no CTDs, so hopefully it will continue to be stable going forward.

[Baroquen]

My interest in the game waned after my first completed game, but that may have been because my second game got sunk my multiple hostile barbarian camps/independent cities crawling too close to my lands. I've start a third game that's off to a better start and is a little more intriguing. Overall, however, while I was open to the changes, they're not grabbing me. The lack of polish throughout, plus the half-baked structural changes have left me feeling cool toward the game. It's disappointing because I usually can gauge my interests independently from the critics/internet noise. But it looks like they were right and I agree this time. (I haven't been this wrong in judging my liking a game since Wildermyth - but the reverse. Internet loved it, I thought I would too; I very much did not).

Anyway, I'm still playing it on and off. Experimenting with an economic/diplomatic strategy at the moment. Polish/patches/improvements will probably bolster the experience of playing later. In the meantime - meh.

[Max Peck]

Some of the gameplay mechanics that I find least impressive are the ones they didn't bother changing significantly from previous iterations, to whit the religion unit spam in the exploration age and the explorer spam in the modern age. I suspect the AI is also better at spamming scouts in the ancient age, but it isn't as obvious because it's mostly happening off stage where you can't see it. In my most recent game I couldn't make any headway converting settlements to my religion because all the other civs were spamming the map with their priests, so I ended up ignoring religion, which really should be a key component of that age. Similarly, I wasn't able to make much headway with artifacts in the modern age because the other civs pumped out swarms of explorers and picked everything clean before I could research and excavate any sites. All but one of my artifacts were found when building over old city structures. I think the core problem is that there were just too many competing civilizations, each of which is better at micromanaging those special units than I am. It's just something that the AI can do better than me.

The obvious solution is to be more bloody minded about culling the competition in the ancient and exploration ages.

[YellowKing]

I just hit my first Modern Age in the Tecumseh run, and things are about to get interesting. I eliminated Frenchie just before the Exploration age ended, taking over his entire continent. Unfortunately Catherine the Great had one distant land settlement I couldn't get to in time, so she survived.

I'm bee-lining towards a Military victory, but it's going to be a nail-biter to see if I can achieve it before Ibn and Isabella hit their victory paths. Isabella is the biggest threat at the moment. While my armies absolutely dwarf hers, she's got a really robust income coming in. And at some point I've got to turn on at least one of them, so I'm not sure yet how I'm going to navigate that.