While many of the older systems have been removed and new ones have been added in their place, it feels like exactly the right amount of change without being overwhelming.
CIVILIZATION VII feels comfortable for veterans of the series, with plenty of quality-of-life improvements that'll make you think, ‘hmm that’s an interesting change’ or ‘Why didn’t they swap this over earlier?’
With a series as long running as Civ, it’s inevitable that regular sequential updates would become burdened with unnecessary systems that didn’t actually make the game better, systems that were still there because that’s just the way it always was.
By casting off some of the baggage the game is much better for it, with plenty of room to grow, and nothing too extreme as to upset longtime players.
If you played Civ 6 or any of the previous entries CIVILIZATION VII isn’t going to be that much of a departure, but when you look back you realise how far it’s come.
There are no workers in Civilization VII, improvements just build themselves. Need a road to a new town or nation? Send a Merchant and they’ll build one along the way.
Those Merchants open up the luxury trades between nations as well, you don’t need to send over a prime piece of technology in exchange for some luxury, it just connects to a wider network when you build that trade route.
You’ll be chatting to the leaders of your fellow nations pretty regularly, but you’ll only have a few options to pick from this time around.
It seems simplified and it is, for example propose a cultural exchange and if your fellow leader accepts but doesn't support it, you get a slightly larger bonus and they get a small bonus for not rejecting it outright.
If they chuck in some of their own influence, one of the social resources in the game, that unlocks a bigger bonus for each of you.
It encourages you to keep the deals up all the time. Old mate wants a farmers market? Yeah why not! I might even pop out some veggies of my own.
Depending on how your Civ is geared, you might run into a bit of an influence drought and be forced into a corner unable to support those bigger benefits, but accepting a positive deal usually costs nothing.
I remember clearly having to build intricate deals with staged gold payments, luxuries and more just to get the NPCs to give up one of their precious technologies. In hindsight it felt like trial and error rather than skill and probably wasn’t that fun, and honestly I didn’t miss it at all.
Though being denounced by an enemy civilization because you can’t pay the influence cost to offset it is very confusingly worded, it wasn’t exactly clear why my neighbour had decided to start hating me the first couple of times.
Towns don’t immediately grow to a stage where you’re managing multiple different build queues and countdowns, instead they contribute to the overall resource pool for the bigger cities. If you’ve got the cash to spend you can buy up infrastructure right away, which is incredibly helpful in the exploration stage when you branch out from your home continent.
You can pay the fee and upgrade your settlement to a full blown city which works similarly to how you’ve always played them. The important part is that you don’t have to do this at all, so it feels more narratively interesting, but you’re given the option to boost one of your towns to city level when you enter the next age.
Ages are probably the biggest departure from the previous games, each of the three phases - Antiquity, Exploration and Modern - really play as separate games. The best example I can think of is how tabletop games like Risk Legacy or Pandemic Legacy build upon each phase of the game and change fundamental truths of the world as you play. The actions you take in each phase determine at some level what options are open to you when your previous civilization disappears into that annals of history.
Pick up enough Jade and you can become one culture, or stick with a civilization that is geographically adjacent to where you started. Each game plays out pretty differently based on the variety of factors that are presented through play. You can do things like go in a cultural line from the Romans to the Incas to Americans keeping some of the key traits between each age.
As your cities and towns stretch across the world you’re likely to come across natural disasters like exploding volcanoes or flooding rivers, or even cyclones. Often these SimCity like incidents have a damaging impact on improvements to tiles, your fishing boats will be destroyed when the river banks burst, but the adjacent tiles will benefit when it comes to growing food as the inundation refreshes the land. Some of those larger rivers can even be traversed by ships, which is a small but surprisingly cool change which allows a major harbor to be based on an inland lake. When you think about how many of the world’s great cities were built on rivers which formed the heart of their trade it makes sense.
Through each age there is a ticking counter in the top right corner, marking progress before the next phase. Actions like taking or destroying cities, building wonders or collecting relics or researching technology push this counter up and up. When everyone reaches the final stages of this age you hit a crisis where a pile of negative civics end up piling up into their own little basket of stress as you watch your people become unhappy and your money disappear. Luckily that doesn’t last forever and soon you’re reborn as a brand new culture and the plane is evened out once again. It’s clever, it means you can catch up, even if another player or NPC has pulled away from you.
Some of the traditions from your past continue onwards but others can be replaced if they no longer suit the play style of your new culture. It seemed so wild to be completely disconnecting the leaders from their cultures and reinventing each major phase of the game but it’s so surprisingly satisfying when it happens.
It’s not all perfect however, it’s incredibly easy to lose track of units that decide to traverse the entire planet rather than wait for an enemy unit blocking their path, building queues in your city don’t give you much of a prompt when they are finished entirely and clicking into towns with a unit sitting on top takes one too many clicks.
City States aren't as satisfying this time round, it doesn't feel like you interact with them as much as in the past with the only diplomatic options until you become their Suzerain extremely limited. It pays to be friends, but it costs a massive amount of influence to start that process and if another Civ has started being buddy buddy with them, it doesn't seem possible at all to overtake them so the lost Influence just feels incredibly wasteful.
But that’s offset by incredibly robust gameplay even on aging devices, you don’t feel penalised for not racing out to buy the fanciest new graphics card. Obviously it’ll be a much prettier game for doing so, but it’s snappy throughout each phase.
Civilization VII is the shot in the arm the series needed. Even if you’ve played hundreds of hours of the previous games, you won’t be daunted by the changes or miss the omissions.
Now excuse me it’s my turn and I need to just have a few more before I call it a night.
A copy of CIVILIZATION VII on PC was provided to SIFTER for the purposes of this preview.
