Civilization is a series known for being one of the most addicting in the world. The habit-forming behavior of “One more turn syndrome” has hit many gamers in some capacity or another, and now Civilization has returned with yet another attempt to monopolize your free time when you really should be taking care of laundry or cleaning your living space. The seventh game in the series, Sid Meier’s Civilization VII attempts to revolutionize some of the micromanagement pervasive throughout previous entries of the series and simplify common tasks like building so you can take your “one more turn” faster than ever before. Is this a Civilization that needs wiped off the map, or is this the new Ubermensch of the 4X genre? Let’s find out.
Civilization is a game series where you and several other players compete to make the biggest, most powerful or enlightened civilization around while wheeling and dealing with other leaders. Each player has to pick a particular route they want to win with, including Science, Culture, Economic, or Military paths, and complete goals along those paths to be the first to achieve victory. You’ll earn gold and influence, and will be able to create new settlements and expand your existing ones into towns or even cities. Other leaders can try to interfere with your plans, but careful use of influence can make leaders more amenable to your presence.
One very neat change made in Civilization VII is that you can use civilizations and leaders separately, so if you want Benjamin Franklin leading the Ming Dynasty or Machiavelli in charge of the United States, those are totally paths you can take should you want to do so. Some leaders may synergize with some civilizations better than others, as each leader has specific abilities that make some of the win conditions more expedient than others because various leaders and civilizations specialize in different things.
A major change that Civilization VII has brought to the table is that now you’re on a time limit through specific ages. This was mostly done to address the snowballing problem that could pop up in previous Civilization titles, where one player may wind up getting significantly ahead of the others early, finding favorable city-states while other players may get harassed by barbarians or attacked by neighbors, which makes the likelihood of the advantaged player obvious, but still hundreds of turns away from when they can win. In Civilization VII, it soft resets at two different points by advancing from one age to the next. You begin in Antiquity, move to the Age of Exploration, and then finally to the Modern Age. During these soft reset periods, players who achieved conditions along their specified victory path can start off the next age with several advantages, but generally nothing as large or as overwhelming as what could happen in previous Civilization titles.
Clearing objectives among the various victory paths can cause an age to come to an end sooner than usual, which can cut off the development of other civilizations in your game. In Antiquity, you have four major goals spread among the four predominant development paths: Science, Cultural, Military, and Economic. If you’re new, you can select an advisor who will help you identify which buildings, technologies, and civics to acquire as you progress through the different ages. The advisors and more streamlined building make Civilization VII one of the best Civilization games for new players to try and get into, as a lot of the micromanaging minutia is toned down considerably here.
Victory conditions also change across the ages, which can force you to be more dynamic in your response to what other players are achieving in the game. While someone pursuing a Science victory may spend their time building libraries to acquire the necessary codices to win in Antiquity, military players will be going out of their way to control as many towns and cities as possible, with the conquered ones counting more towards their total than ones peacefully acquired. By the time the Exploration Age begins, if you’re on the Science path you’ll still focus on scientific gains, but players on the Economic path will be doing a whole side quest of finding treasures in distant lands and shipping them back via a treasure fleet while a military player tries to sink their ships.
After enough time has passed in an age, which can be pushed along faster by players achieving their win conditions, Civilization VII will take a moment and shift you from a crisis in Antiquity to the Exploration Age. This will typically involve a brief break where you can pick a new civilization, as well as various perks to gain an advantage in the next age depending on how much of your victory conditions you achieved. Both of these mechanics are important, as your victory conditions for the Exploration Age will differ from the ones set in Antiquity. Exploration is when you’ll get access to long distance sailing and will be able to find new continents to take over, or treasures to extract and bring back home.
It’s worth noting that when an Age transition happens, a good portion of your military will disappear, towns that were promoted to cities will reset back to towns again (though you can sometimes keep more depending on your Legacy Points), and leader relationships and wars will also be reset, so there are no forever wars that last centuries in this entry. After you complete an Age, you’ll be taken to the Legacies screen where your progress in the previous Age will be converted into Legacy Points for you to start off the next Age a little stronger. These can be just starting with an additional attribute point for your leader, but you can also start with extra gold and influence, science and culture, or the ability to maintain additional cities through the Age transition too. There are a variety of these boons of all different strengths, so you can pick and choose what best meets your style.
There are several game mechanics that have been greatly improved in Civilization VII, for example, independent peoples. City states and barbarians from previous Civilization games have effectively been combined into one group, and you can choose to befriend them to gain a city-state bonus from them or wipe them out should they get aggressive with you or reside in a place you’d like to establish a city. By spending Influence, you can become the suzerain of the city-state which will yield a bonus of your choosing, giving you resources, production, or even benefits directly related to victory conditions for your chosen path.
A lot of new and returning units have received a variety of changes as well. Civilization VII utilizes fog of war, so if you don’t have eyes on an area, you can’t see where the opposing leaders have their units, where goody huts are, or anything of that sort. Scouts in Civilization VII can exchange a point of their movement to increase their vision range in all directions, revealing nearby points of interest. This makes them considerably more powerful and gives the player more options with the unit, such as do you stay stationary to be a lookout, do you move one tile and search, or do you move two tiles to try and see even further next turn? More options are generally always good!
Workers, a staple of Civilization micromanagement from previous games, are gone in Civilization VII. While there are still noncombat units to transport around, like Settlers, Merchants, Scouts, etc., you no longer need to manage your builders in order to do most of the things that are needed to be done. This can be seen as a negative, but it was actually pretty quick and snappy to just select what kind of improvements you want to make to a tile, and those improvements simply get done. This does mean that roads get automatically created across settlements.
Unit promotion has been radically changed in Civilization VII as well. In previous Civilization titles, your units would be able to level up individually, but now that’s limited mostly to your Commanders. Army Commanders manage your land forces and are available right from the start of Antiquity, and you unlock Naval and Aircraft Commanders in Exploration and Modern Ages, specifically. These are the only units who can gain experience and promotion bonuses and can function like APCs in other strategy games where you can use them to transport your units around the map but also to engage in combat directly. While this system appeared stifling at first, it seemed like less micromanagement occurred during later stages of Civilization VII, which made me appreciate this change more after many hours of play.
Of course, there very much appears to have been a lot of Civilization VII left on the cutting room floor. There seems to have been a fourth Age planned that got cut some time before release because finishing a game in the Modern Age will show you Legacy Points you can spend in the next Age… of which there isn’t one. You can also build Ageless buildings in the Modern Age, which is an odd choice if there’s no subsequent Age as well. That being said, there’s a lot more to like about Civilization VII than dislike, but there are a few qualms about it as it currently stands.
Going from one Civilization title to another can be a massive pain because there will always be fresh nuances to learn, and some features that players may have come to rely on will be left out of the new game. The search function from Civilization VI that could be used to highlight specific tiles or find units is completely gone, along with several other quality of life improvements from previous titles. This means that your inability to find a specific settlement or losing a unit somewhere on the map is just something that’s going to happen occasionally. Finding where you built a specific facility in the event you forget, such as your library, now involves clicking the city in question, choosing the building list, scrolling down to library, and then clicking that to show you where it is.
The most unfortunate thing about Civilization VII is that its user interface is atrocious when matched with the gameplay. Rather than complain about fonts or poor utilization of space, I think it’s more important to focus on what works and doesn’t work in the UI, since it’s your primary vehicle for interacting with Civilization VII. Sometimes text will extend outside the boundaries of its dialogue boxes, pushing off into the ether or potentially offscreen. At other times, you’ll need to click repeatedly to attack an enemy unit because you clicked into the space the enemy is on but didn’t quite click the exact spot the game intended or clicked on the large, ugly health bar that floats on top of the hexagonal space that you’re attacking which somehow doesn’t count as clicking to attack.
There are also issues with UI elements that should disappear after using them, but they don’t actually vanish as they’re supposed to. If a natural disaster occurs, you’ll probably spend a little gold repairing some of your buildings, but the repair option just won’t go away until you back out of the menu and then go back in. Sometimes all elements in a menu will vanish until you collapse and expand the build tab you were previously in, just strange occurrences that happen without rhyme or reason. Besides misaligned text and strange scaling concerns, there are other issues with the user interface like arbitrarily hiding information from players with an obfuscated road connection system.
The connections system, where you can send a trader unit to establish trade routes, is of paramount importance for sharing food across the settlements, plus treasure fleets, railroads, and factories in the later ages. For whatever reasons, these connections can break when going from one age to another, with no way to restore those trade routes to regain yields from towns, effectively making those towns less useful than they should be. There can be very obvious roads visible on the map leading from one of your towns to one of your cities, but if this bug pops up when going from the Age of Antiquity to the Exploration Age, the road will still be present on the map when you zoom in, but it’s impossible to actually get the yields from those towns.
For whatever reason, city connections are actively hidden from players, so the only way to know is to click the town’s menu, click another button, and then check the new dialogue box to see if they’re actually providing their yields to all of your settlements, and if they’re not, you’re looking forward to spending a good amount of time trying to fix the issue. This is on top of age transitions sometimes doing goofy things like spawning your fleets from the Exploration Age on completely landlocked lakes, with no ability to build a canal to get ships out of where the game randomly placed them, and instead requiring you build another settlement to transport them over several more turns. It’s just strange how many bugs can pop up during a single game across the three eras, and while it’s somewhat understandable since Civilization games are complex mechanically, things like city connections being broken seems like it would make Civilization VII nearly indecipherable to a casual player if these bugs aren’t squashed.
That being said, while there are complaints that can be had about Civilization VII’s UI or the bugginess in relation to city connections, it’s still really desperately easy to lose an entire weekend to this title. You click to start playing Friday night, and then you finally win on Sunday evening after playing 12-18 hours in a single weekend, confused as to how you already need to go to bed for work in the morning. That’s the Civilization Curse, and it still exists to this day. The developers of Civilization VII wanted to guarantee the same strong gameplay with a radical desire to shake things up, hence the Ages system, but the bug-laden experience indicates a case of developers who ran out of time for bug fixing.
Overall, Civilization VII is a good title. It has slick visuals, streamlined a lot of systems for newcomers, and is still just as addictive as any Civilization that came before it. There are some warts on this otherwise impressive title, however, like the user interface and numerous bugs that can hamper the gameplay experience, but Civilization VII is just as habit-forming as it has always been, in spite of these flaws. This is especially true for new players, as the gameplay updates in this entry make it considerably more accessible for new and returning players alike. Civilization VII is absolutely worth it, and one more turn syndrome will hit you like a stack of bricks even while you may find the UI cumbersome.
Developers: Firaxis Games
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 5, Steam, Xbox Series X