Civilization is one of only two games I’ve had on every computer I’ve ever owned, in its multiple versions, since I first encountered it. (The other is NetHack.) It’s also important in my family. My wife plays it frequently (although she’s been on a Balatro kick recently), and I remember my middle child, in middle school, responding to a vocabulary quiz where they were asked to define “civilization” with the answer: “Civilization is a game designed by Sid Meier.”
Obviously, I’m well disposed toward this long-running turn-based strategy series. But Civilization 7, as currently constituted, has some real flaws – and though I expect they may be fixed in future updates (and there are workarounds), some of this is a little sloppy.
The most basic issue is: combat sucks.
Before we get to why, let’s first talk about some of Civilization 7’s big new ideas. It’s pretty clear that the main design concern this time is to address two criticisms of the earlier iterations. In fact, the game is successful on that score.
One concern is the “snowball effect.” In most previous versions of Civ, the tension tends to fall in the early to mid-game. In these earliest eras of history, you need to expand rapidly, you can encounter risky dealings with barbarians and city states, and other countries can attack you when you’re not really ready to wage a war. But by the time you’ve entered the late game, you can probably power through any challenge you face, because you’re smart enough to ensure that you have superior technology and enough of a military to deal with any challenge the AI throws at you. In other words, the end-game can get dull, and you’re just playing to a fairly inevitable victory.
This is the motivation behind Civ 7’s most sweeping changes to the formula. The basic idea is that, as the age changes from ancient to exploration to modern, there’s kind of a reset. In previous iterations, you played the same civilization from front to back; once you had selected to play as the French or the Americans or the Aztecs, you were always the French or the Americans or the Aztecs. In this game, you change civilizations with each age change; I was the Greeks, then the Ming (a Chinese dynasty), then the French (vive l’empereur!).
With each era change, many of your military units go away (you get to keep six, plus what your generals can sustain). You keep your settlements, but towns you promoted to cities become towns again (you get to keep or establish one more city). Wars go away, along with negative policies, and relationships with AI opponents reset. In other words, you retain much progress, but it’s almost like you’re starting a new game.
You also get a choice of what your new civilization is at the era change. At the end of the classic era, I was lagging greatly in technology (as the Greeks? Does that make sense?) so chose the Ming, who have an advantage in technology, and this did allow me to recapture ground in the tech sector. So there are tasty strategic choices here, in terms of what next-gen civilization serves you best.
Civ 7 differentiates between “towns” and “cities”: cities are much like cities in other versions of the series, using production to construct buildings, units, and wonders, although they can no longer insta-complete construction projects with money. Towns can be improved too, but take only money to build things. You can promote a town to a city (with money maybe better spent on town improvements), but at the end of the age, promoted cities get demoted to towns again, so you rarely want to do that (except in the modern age, if your town has a decent production economy, because no demotion is forthcoming).
In other words, the basic idea behind this system is to reset the game and the economy with each era change, to avoid the snowballing end-game of previous versions. And it works! It does solve that problem, but with some downsides.
In some ways, you stop identifying with a civilization, and instead identify with your leader, who persists through the ages. I played as Machiavelli, who has some advantages in diplomacy, and I generally try to avoid wars if I can. But you also tend to identify opposing AIs with their leader: Frederic the Great was a persistent pain in the butt for me, and I don’t even remember what civilizations he led (aggressive asshole, though). There is an upside in that I’d bet that playing Greece-Ming-France as Harriet Tubman would be a rather different experience than the same succession as Machiavelli. In other words, diverse combinations of leaders and civilizations creates more – and more interesting – choices.
One of the other criticisms of late-game Civ in earlier versions is the sheer amount of monkey work you had to do. You had, by the late game, a horde of worker units you had to manage, and while you could partially automate them (just build railroads until I tell you otherwise), it still took a lot of time. Oh, build a farm here. Oh, build a road to this city. Particularly on large maps, this produced a fair bit of grind.
This is totally gone in Civ 7. Building improvements to a hex does not require the use of a worker, and instead you simply select the hex and order the improvement with hammers (for cities) or gold (for towns) and wait for it to complete. Roads and railroads are automagically completed between your settlements over time. Mostly, this is a good thing, though at times it’s frustrating (why don’t I have a railroad to here yet, when I could totally use one?) but it absolutely does reduce the amount of busy-work you face in the late game.
It’s not just workers. Another improvement is the use of military leaders. Let’s say Prussia has just invaded (thanks, Frederick the Great) and I need to bus a whole bunch of military units to my southern border. Instead of having to move them one-by-one, I can take a military leader, have a whole bunch of units join under their command, move it where it needs to be, and then either have the commander attack as a whole or deploy the units around that commander to control more territory. In Civ, being at war slows the game down a great deal, as you suddenly have to activate (or build) a slew of military units and control them over multiple turns. That’s still the case in this edition, but the system of military leaders does ameliorate the problem to a noticeable degree, by allowing you to group multiple units under leaders and toss them about the map by issuing commands to the leader alone.
In other words, Civ 7 takes time-consuming chores from previous iterations of the game, and makes them faster. Need to command workers? No more. Need to move a bunch of troops? Easier. In other words: smart and commendable design decisions.
This makes it all the more baffling how boneheaded the combat interface is. To attack units in an adjoining hex, you select your unit, then click on the hex you want to attack. Simple, right? Nope! Did you click the “move” button first? No, so the attack doesn’t happen. Instead, you get a dialog telling you about the enemy unit.
Okay, so you have to make clear that you want to move into the hex to deliver the attack? Fine, okay, click on your unit, then the move button, then on the hex containing the enemy unit. That’s clear right? Nope! You click move, then on the enemy unit, and you get a dialog telling you about the enemy unit.
It can get even worse. Let’s say the enemy unit is in a city with a city banner along the top of the hex. You clicked on the banner? You get a dialog about the city, and do not attack, even if you selected your unit and then the move button. In some cases, 90+% of the hex is occupied by either the enemy unit icon or a city banner and the only way to cause an attack is to zoom in, and click on the tiny 10% of the hex that isn’t occupied by the enemy unit icon or the city banner. Otherwise, you’re sitting there like an idiot saying “But I’m at war, why can’t I attack, I told you to attack, this is dumb.”
The UI gives you no interaction as to why you’re failing. In my early user experience, I actually Googled “how do I attack in Civ 7?”. No help there. Eventually I figured it out. I can’t click on a unit to attack. I can’t click on a city to attack. I have to… click anywhere else to attack.
This is just braindead UI/UX design. If I hadn’t already selected “move,” the game might reasonably say “okay, the player wants info on the unit or city if they click there.” Fine, I might. Or the game could give an “attack!” button to make it absolutely clear what I want to do. But every other iteration of the Civ series assumes that if you move into an enemy unit or city, you want to attack it. So there is no verb other than “move into.” Except that now, that means… nothing. “Move into,” but we don’t let you attack unless you specifically click on…. Anything else in the hex that you don’t actually want to attack.
This issue is blindingly obvious, and the fix is simple: if the user has clicked the “move to” icon, it should be clear they want to attack, and it shouldn’t matter at all where in the target hex they click. You could also maybe have a modal dialog saying “oh are you sure you want to attack?” Which would still be kind of dumb, but at least better UX than the current experience.
As noted, I typically prefer to avoid war in Civ games anyway, but achieving a world-conquest victory is also harder in this iteration. First of all, there are severe happiness penalties if you exceed a limit on the number of cities you are allowed to own, particularly punishing if you exceed that limit in the Ancient era. But there’s another difference: Civ 7, by default, generates the world with different continents, separated by deep sea zones you cannot penetrate until the Exploration era and its accompanying naval units. So a world conquest option is not even feasible at game start – there are civs on other continents not even reachable until you reach the Exploration era.
There are other world-generation options at start-up, like the archipeligo-style distribution of other prior Civs. But this default setting remains startling in its own way, because only the original Civ had this kind of “continental” set-up. Playing Civ 1, I encountered a surprisingly advanced France on the other side of the globe, and while I managed to defeat them, I did so only by pumping out battleships and bombarding their ports by sending them to the other side of the planet. Civ 7 is (as far as I know) the first game in the series since then to focus on disconnected continents. In a way, this continental distribution is more realistic, and I think this is a reasonable design choice, and maybe one I prefer.
Particularly in combat, the game has real UI issues, and while I personally like to play versions of Civ keeping wars to a minimum, you can’t always ensure that. Even though I chose a leader with advantages in diplomacy, I found myself at war for much of the game (opponents seem to be particularly aggressive in the Exploration era, while it’s easier to avoid wars in the early and late game), so this is an issue. And of course, some players prefer more aggressive strategies than I.
Otherwise, the major design changes in Civ 7 address important criticisms of earlier versions and help to ensure that players are faced with challenges, not tedium, even as the game progresses – albeit at some loss. By the time I wrote this review, I had spent more than 50 hours playing the game – proof enough that despite its flaws, Civilization 7 sustains that “one more turn!” desire to plow through history and see what happens next.
This review is based on a free copy of the game provided by the publisher.