Last week marked the release of the seventh mainline installment in the Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise, Sid Meier’s Civilization VII. Civilization (Civ) is a turn-based 4X (The four X’s: explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) strategy game where players build a civilization from any era of history spanning from ancient times to the twentieth century and into an imagined near future. Players explore and build cities, engage in trade, diplomacy, and wars with other civilizations, and above all make a set of decisions over the course of the game. I’ve been playing Civ for as long as I can remember, from booting up Civ IV on the family computer at a young age, to now having a few hundred hours in both Civ V and Civ VI. Hence the crux of this article: over the next few years, I’ll probably spend a similar amount of time playing the new Civilization VII.
If you’ve never played a Civilization game before, then I would recommend picking up Civ V or Civ VI and all of their downloadable content when they inevitably go on sale. They are great games and usually go on sale for under $30. I can’t recommend Civ VII to new players, since most modern games are fairly buggy or imperfect on launch and Civ VII is no exception, although the problems with the game will very likely be fixed in a year or two.
If you have played a Civilization game before and are looking for a new and interesting game that will improve in the next few years, then I can recommend Civ VII. While it is still fundamentally a game about making interesting decisions while moving your little guys around a map, Civ VII takes scores of bold design deviations from the past 15 years of Civilization. Instead of playing as one civilization throughout the entire game, you must choose a new one for each of the three ages of the game. This update results in a balancing act between a simplification of old systems and the complication of new ones. While playing as three separate civilizations adds an additional level of complexity, reducing the number of eras from nine to three balances it out.
Many of these bold design decisions have rubbed longtime fans of the series the wrong way — at the time of writing, Civ VII has mixed reviews on Steam with only 51% positive reviews. The lack of a “one more turn” button which lets players continue playing after the game has “ended” is controversial, as well as the era changes soft-resetting your civilization.
These new design decisions may or may not improve the game, but I appreciate that they radically change the way the game is played. Civ VII has a soft-cap on the number of cities you can build in each age which, combined with the era system, means that the exploration era of the game feels more exciting than similar eras in any other Civilization game I’ve played since there is more space and incentive to explore and expand as the player researches new sailing technology. Even if some of the decisions end up being bad, at least they will have moved the game in a different direction than previous titles. For non-narrative strategy games like Civilization, sequels should be designed as different games.
My one major complaint which I am certain is a bad design choice at this point, and is echoed in nearly every Steam review, is that the user interface (UI) largely violates several of the principles I’ve been learning in Interaction Design Fundamentals. So if you’re reading this, Sid Meier, I’d love to get a job at Firaxis and help fix the UI.
Overall, I am impressed by the bold direction the Civilization franchise has taken with Civ VII. Given how unpolished Civ VI was on release and how much it has improved over the last nine years, I believe we will see Civ VII become a very interesting game over time.
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