Since writing up my first impressions of Civilization VII a few weeks ago, I’ve continued to play the game. Today, I wanted to cover a few points that I didn’t make in that original piece – which I wrote after about six hours of gameplay – as well as make one amendment to something I feel was unclear last time.
For the record, I still think Civilization VII has a lot of potential. But right now, there are things holding it back – as well as a few bugs and issues that I didn’t notice at first that really need to be patched out as quickly as possible. I’ve kind of hit the wall with Civ VII after about 40 hours of gameplay, and I probably won’t jump back in until the next update. There’s a reason for that, and we’ll begin there.
At time of writing, there’s a bug – or at least a major imbalance – that has totally ruined several games for me. In short, either AI civs are underpowered or barbarian city-states are overpowered. In several recent games I’ve played – or rather, attempted to play – this has led to barbarians conquering and defeating AI players before the game can really get going. There’s no way to increase the number of AI players in the game to try to counteract this, and it isn’t something that’s only happening on lower difficulty settings or certain maps, either.
Having barbarians and hostile city-states is great, it adds a whole extra dynamic to gameplay and it makes the very early game feel more tense and dangerous. But these mini-factions have to be balanced better, because they shouldn’t be able to knock out AI civilisations except under rare and unusual circumstances. Making them an obstacle for human players is great – but making them so overpowered that they can kill one, two, or even three civs in the ancient era before the game has a chance to get going… that ruins the game for me. And I’m sure it has for other players, too.
I’m mostly familiar with Civilization VI. That was the first game in the series I played extensively, so it’s my point of comparison. Barbarian tribes in that game could be aggressive, particularly in the early game. And while I can’t call to mind any specific examples, it must’ve happened at least once that an AI civ was knocked out of the game by a particularly strong barbarian attack. If that did happen, though, it was a rare occurrence no matter what the settings were, and it simply isn’t something that should be happening so often in Civilization VII.
Because of the way Civ VII’s eras work, knocking out an AI player cuts down the amount of time an age lasts. In one recent game, the ancient age seemed to be over in a flash after not one but two AI players were defeated off-screen – presumably by barbarians. The game only has three eras to begin with… so speed-running one of them in this fashion isn’t great.
That leads into my next point. This is much bigger for Civilization VII and much less easy to fix… but there really aren’t enough ages in the game, and the way they operate as effectively three mini-games in one feels limiting.
I’m an adaptable person, and Civilization VII’s new rules and new gameplay mechanics should be surmountable for me. I’m not lashing out at the game because I “don’t like change,” or I want to keep playing Civ VI. Having played quite a few games now, with different leaders and factions, I’m beginning to get used to most of the changes and differences – but the way eras function is something I’m still struggling with.
I mentioned in my first impressions that war doesn’t carry over from one era to another – nor do most units. Even units that survive an era transition don’t remain where they had been placed on the map; they’re either grouped together in an army or dropped one by one into cities and towns – which also don’t survive the era transition in their previous form. All cities except for the capital revert to being towns, losing all of the bonuses cities get and forcing you to re-convert them later.
This really limits the way Civilization VII plays. To give one example: if I want to wage war in the ancient era, I basically have to build up my military from turn one and choose the first civ I meet as my target for conquest. There just isn’t enough time – even in a game with the maximum number of turns and eras that are as long as the game allows with its current, very limited options – to do things any other way. However you look at it, this is a limitation on play styles, because I’m forced to do one of two things. Either I have to write off the idea of an early war and conquest of a neighbour – which can be limiting and annoying, as AI civs have a tendency to forward-settle, placing cities right next to mine or even in the middle of my burgeoning empire. Or I have to prepare for war from turn one.
War can be time-consuming in a game like Civilization VII, and if you’re coming up on the end of an era, there’s basically no point in even starting one. The end of an era forces you to make peace with anyone you’re fighting, and it also removes units from the board and repositions others, meaning it isn’t possible to instantly re-start a conflict after the transition. This makes war in the early game much more limited – either you launch an attack as early as possible against whichever unlucky civ you’re right next to, or you’re stuck on the defensive, lacking enough time to build up a sufficiently-sized army to launch a full-scale conquest.
The one thing a 4X strategy game like Civilization VII mustn’t do is limit your options. War, diplomacy, exploration, peace… everything should be on the table, and as the player I should feel in control. Sure, there are gonna be times where I’m under attack and on the defensive. And there should be unpredictable elements in there. But if I know for a fact that there’s basically no point starting a war once the era clock reaches a certain point, or that all I have to do is hold on for a few more turns because a mandatory peace treaty is coming as soon as the era ends… that puts real limits on even defensive wars.
Beyond just war, though, I find the way eras are handled to be pretty limiting. Each faction has unique civics to unlock, for example, but these come at the expense of the regular civics tree, and with one civics tree per era your choice is either fall behind the AI or sacrifice those unique policies and bonuses. In a longer game with one civics tree, it might be easier to catch up – or to race ahead in order to dedicate time later on to unlocking those dedicated civilisation civics. But the eras limit this mechanic in a pretty disappointing way.
Eras also limit exploration, and by extension what kinds of maps are available. Because the middle exploration era is entirely focused on colonisation, it’s impossible to speed-run a tech like celestial navigation in order to settle islands or continents that are separated from your starting area by ocean tiles. There are also resources – like cocoa, for instance – that are locked until the exploration era. It isn’t even possible to explore islands and continents elsewhere on the map before the game deems it acceptable.
Again… this is really limiting. I can’t build a ship or a scout and send them off to the far corners of the map; I’m stuck on my starting continent or island until one-third of the game has passed. This, in turn, limits what kind of maps are available – there are no Mediterranean maps, for example, with land surrounding a body of water, or single-continent maps with outlying islands. There are fewer map types and less map variety in order to accommodate this eras system… and for me, the trade-off isn’t close to being worth it.
Then we come to era transitions, and choosing new factions. In my first impressions, I noted that most factions are locked until certain gameplay requirements are met to unlock them – and I should clarify that I was referring to this transition between eras. In one case, I had been playing as Isabella and chose Spain for the exploration age. But when the era ended, I literally only had one option for the modern age: Mexico. All of the other modern era civs were locked because I hadn’t, for instance, settled a city on tundra or dug three oil wells. Because these requirements were not communicated well – and were not communicated at all in the preceding era – I had no choice but to finish that game as Mexico.
Obviously I’ve got nothing against playing as Mexico, and I would’ve picked that civ eventually. But why should Civ VII be so restrictive with its faction choices? Even in more recent games where I’m more aware of these limitations and I’ve tried to overcome them, there are always some civs locked when the ancient age transitions to the exploration age, or when the exploration age gives way to the modern age.
I can understand the developers wanting to make sure players don’t accidentally shoot themselves in the foot by choosing a civ with bonuses that aren’t applicable or with unique abilities that they’d struggle to take advantage of because of the way earlier era(s) have unfolded. But these restrictions feel way too limiting as they’re currently implemented, and with the whole “choose one civ per era” mechanic being Civilization VII’s biggest new feature, it shouldn’t be so difficult and finicky to work with. This is basically the entire selling-point of the game – so why make it so limited and restrictive?
Part of the appeal of Civilization VII is the idea that I can chart my own unique route through history. I can start as Egypt, then become the Inca, before ending the game as Prussia. If I play as Spain and find I can only transition to become Mexico… that completely robs this aspect of the game of its one unique selling-point, and is yet another limitation on gameplay styles in a game that already has no shortage of those.
I want to be able to choose in what order I move units or set policies. Sometimes, Civilization VII will arbitrarily limit this, forcing me to choose the benefits of a celebration before I can move units. If I’m in the middle of a war or trying to lay siege to a city, I want to focus on that first and foremost! If I select a unit, I shouldn’t be forced to do something else before I can order it to move or attack.
There also seems to be a bug where, after building the Dogo Onsen wonder, every city in my empire gains population (meaning I have to manually grow each city by adding a tile or specialist). This is pretty annoying, especially when you have twenty-plus cities; having to manually click through all of them, adding a tile or specialist, before the game will let you do anything else takes up a lot of time. Hopefully this bug can be fixed in the next update.
Speaking of bugs, I’m concerned that natural wonders are glitched. In short, every single game I’ve played has had the same three natural wonders: the Grand Canyon, the Redwood Forest, and Zhangjiajie. I’ve seen the Great Barrier Reef once in one other game – and that’s it. There are, according to the Civ Wiki, fourteen others… but I’ve never seen any of them even once, not in any of the games I’ve played. And this isn’t because I always pick the same civ or the same map type: I’ve played most leaders and most civs at least once, and I’ve tried out all of the map types (but not every size of map, to be fair).
So… is this a bug? Or in forty-some hours of gameplay, have I just been randomly unlucky to continually encounter the same three natural wonders every time? There’s something to be said for that level of random chance… so maybe I should buy a lottery ticket this week! Seriously, though, there are already a pretty sparse amount of these natural wonders – way more need to be added. To keep encountering the exact same ones is just boring and repetitive. If this is a bug I hope it’s patched out. If not… what the heck’s going on?
I like the idea of crises. But unfortunately, this is another area where I fear a bug is causing games to feel repetitive and less-interesting – to the point where I’ve started turning off the crisis option when starting a new game. Crisis events throw up a challenge for your civilisation and force you to implement certain policies which have to be accommodated and worked around. But as above, in every single game I’ve played so far, I’ve encountered the exact same crisis in every age every time.
In the ancient age, I’ve only ever gotten the “revolt” crisis, which sees my empire tested by towns and cities losing happiness due to a variety of factors. There’s some potentially-interesting storytelling here, which is neat… but it gets boring game after game. In the exploration era, every game saw my cities laid waste by plagues. Again, this was potentially interesting, but it wore off after the fourth or fifth time I saw it in successive games. Then, when it came to the modern era, I don’t know if there even are any crises to be had – I haven’t encountered any.
Adding in these kinds of events should be interesting. But if the same ones trigger every single time… is that a bug? I don’t play the game the same way every time, and with different leaders, different civs, and the game set up in totally different ways on different maps, why should I constantly encounter the same crisis events? It’s just another thing that feels, well, limiting. And it got to the point where I decided to just turn off crisis events altogether rather than have yet another instance of the same thing making my game feel repetitive and dull.
Finally, I’d like to talk about Civ VII’s art style – and particularly the way cities look.
I love Civilization VII’s graphics, and going for a more “realistic” look after the stylised and cartoonish Civ VI is a choice that I personally appreciated. It might not be to everyone’s taste, but I felt it was a step up, and I really like the way the game represents water and ships at sea in particular.
However, there’s a problem – and I didn’t really notice it at first. In Civilization VI, it was really easy to tell at a glance which buildings you’d constructed in a city. Campuses and science buildings were blue, for example, and military buildings had red detailing. But in Civ VII, most buildings look very similar to one another, and with no districts or zones that are specific to certain types of building, they can be literally anywhere in a city. This makes it really hard to tell, without zooming in closely or digging through a menu, whether you’ve built all of the libraries and science buildings you wanted to, or whether a city has an important building like a railway station or a market.
This isn’t insurmountable, as it just takes a bit of checking. But when you have a sprawling empire of twenty-plus cities in the late game, it can be hard to keep track of every building. In order to ensure you’re getting the most out of your settlements and maximising your available yields, you need to be on top of what buildings you have and which ones you need. Being able to see, at a glance, which ones are present in which settlement is useful – and stripping this away to leave very generic-looking buildings and urban districts just gets in the way of that. It might make cities look “more realistic,” but it’s less useful and feels like a bit of a hurdle to smooth gameplay.
So after playing a bit more Civ VII (okay, quite a lot more) those are some additional points that I wanted to make. Later in the year, after the game has received more updates, patches, and its first pieces of DLC, I’ll definitely jump back in and see if I want to write an updated review or some additional notes.
I still believe Civ VII is fun – I wouldn’t have played multiple games over forty-plus hours if I wasn’t having a good time most of the time. But there are more limitations than there were in Civilization VI, and the core eras mechanic is one that I feel is doing more to hold the game back than it is to improve it, at least as things sit in March 2025. I’d love to see some bug fixes, changes to the way menus and tech trees are displayed, and perhaps some visual or graphical changes to make certain key buildings more obvious. Those things feel achievable in the short-term, and perhaps updates or expansions could address some of the bigger issues I’ve found.
I hope this has been interesting. I paid a lot of money for Civilization VII, so I definitely want to see the game succeed. I raise these points not out of spite but because I want to see Civ VII improved. There’s a lot of potential in this game… but some of it is being denied or restricted by creative decisions that have limited key aspects of gameplay. There’s plenty of time to make changes and improvements, though, and it’s still early days. I’m hopeful that, in the next few months, things will get noticeably better for Civ VII.
Civilization VII is out now for PC, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S/X consoles. Civilization VII is the copyright of Firaxis and/or Take-Two Interactive. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.
Trekking with Dennis 