New eras for old favorite – Civilization VII Review

 

When Civilization VII comes out in February next year, fans of the strategy franchise will have had to wait more than eight years for a new part. We were able to play the new game, affectionately abbreviated by fans as ‘Civ 7’, for half an hour at Gamescom.

Familiar concept with fundamental changes

For those who have played a Civilization game before, the concept will come as little surprise. You build a society step by step, starting with a small settlement. You gradually expand it until you are the ruler of a large and above all victorious empire.

However, right at the start of the game there is already an important change. You choose a civilization as usual, for example, the Egyptians, but as a leader you no longer have to select the historically appropriate leader. For example, you can rule the Egyptian empire as a Roman emperor or even as someone in a completely different role, such as a scientist or philosopher.

As we know from older Civs, each leader has a set of specific advantages and skills that help you in the further course of the game. What is new is that you can further develop your leader by unlocking attributes and new skills, which you keep throughout the game. In practice, you do this by making choices in events that appear on your screen.

Your choice of a particular leader should therefore fit well with the strategy you have in mind. If you specialize your city according to the powers of your leader, you will benefit optimally from this. Furthermore, your choices for civilization and leader can reinforce each other. For example, with Hatshepsut, the pharaoh of Egypt, you can build ‘wonders’ faster. This is also an advantage of the Roman society, so if you combine her with it, you become a superpower in that area. We even came across a ‘civic’ that gave an extra boost to building wonders, so there are plenty of possibilities to specialize your civilization.

Not eras but ages

A bigger change to the gameplay is the replacement of ‘eras’ with ‘ages’. There are three of them, a lot less. You start in the Antiquity Age, continue the game in the Exploration Age, and end in the Modern Age. Each age has its own civilizations and game elements.

The first age lasts a maximum of 200 ‘turns’ at normal game speed and starts as usual with exploring the area. We played as Emperor Augustus in Rome and within a few turns we came across the first neighbouring settlements. These replace the city states from Civilization VI. They can have neutrality as a starting point or be hostile to you. The diplomatic choices you make, just like the buildings you decide to place, can give you ‘influence’. Later in the game, you can use this again, for example to gather diplomatic support for a war. The party that enjoys less support will be less able to fight effectively and will have a less motivated population.

Expand with more options and choices

In the meantime, you expand your settlement to a city, with more land and buildings. In previous installments, a new ’tile’ was automatically selected for you, without you being able to influence it. Now you can choose which tile this happens to, as long as it borders your existing tiles. Each tile has its own values ​​and starts out fairly empty, but fills up as the game progresses and, for example, more houses are built on it. You also have to remember to provide your population with sufficient food and entertainment, so that it continues to grow.

A much-requested addition to Civilization VII is the ability to navigate rivers. Adjustments to the Settlers system also change the way you expand your empire. A new settlement no longer starts as a city, but is first a village. This earns you money, which you can use to upgrade your village and grow it into a city. There is a limit to the number of cities you can build. You can increase this, but ‘spamming’ small cities at the beginning is no longer an option.

Of course, there are also ‘tech’ and ‘culture trees’ in part seven. However, there is a limit on the number of things you can unlock, so that players do not get too far out of step with each other in the technological field, for example. Only in a new age do new techniques become available to develop. Incidentally, in multiplayer games you start with a maximum of five players in the first two ages. In modern times, a higher maximum of eight players applies. You can choose to play only one age.

The ‘builders’ who could edit your tiles with ‘mines’ and ‘farms’ have been completely removed. Especially in larger games with many cities, this could become somewhat repetitive. There is a distinction between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ development for a tile. An urban tile can initially accommodate a maximum of two buildings, which increases over time. Rural tiles can best be compared to the ’tile improvements’ from previous games, for example to obtain raw materials.

The strength of your army lies in its leader

As Emperor Augustus, we quickly went to war and focused on developing discipline and training soldiers. Neighboring cities had a hard time, but in general the battles in this phase are still not very special. What is nice is that you see your armies fighting, even when they are not actually attacking. In previous games, two enemy, neighboring units only looked at each other a bit; now it really feels like there is a longer battle going on, with an active, moving front line.

After a few short battles, the war spirit of our inhabitants was gone. We were warned that this could lead to poorer performance and dissatisfaction, unless we did something about it by, for example, building or appointing a ‘commander’. The new commanders lead groups of soldiers, ‘units’, that you can no longer upgrade yourself. A well-trained commander can, however, lead more and larger armies. For this, the commander has several small skill trees, each focused on a different branch of warfare and giving bonuses to the troops that join this commander. Think, for example, of expanding the range of archers or extra possibilities for movement.

Moving around the map can be done by a commander with different units, which is easier and faster. Once on the battlefield, you can unpack the army group into separate units, which gives you a feeling of grandeur when attacking opponents. The commander also allows you to select a specific unit from the opposing party, which gives it a bonus in battles.

Great changes between ages

Each end of an age is accompanied by a major event, which can vary. For example, a major war can take place that you have to try to survive. New in Civilization VII is that with this age transition, you do not automatically continue with the logically appropriate, nearby civilization, but that you can switch, provided you prepare for it.

The game designers gave us an example where you start as an Egyptian, but decide to develop considerably in the field of horses. If you have a large cavalry together, you can evolve into a Mongolian culture at the change of age. For these steppe people, horses are crucial as a means of transport.

The concept behind this mechanic may remind you of a game like Humankind. However, one important difference is that you can’t just switch to any civilization; it depends on the choices you’ve made. You can’t, for example, suddenly change your Egyptian civilization to the United States when you switch to the Exploration Age.

The ability to switch civs, albeit limited, is perhaps the most controversial change in Civilization VII. Some players feel that the choice of a single civ at the start of the game is fundamental to the franchise, and that is now being challenged. It will be interesting to see if Firaxis can address this criticism before the release.

After the transition to modern times, the end goal comes into view: winning. You can take four paths to victory, to which your choices contribute throughout the game. The options are an economic, a cultural, a scientific and a military route. The economic route is new, because until now this option was only available in spin-offs, such as Civilization Revolution. Compared to the previous part, ‘diplomatic’ and ‘religious’ have disappeared.

Our half hour of play was of course far too short to arrive at the first age change, but then we would have encountered a substantial innovation. Your old country remains the basis for your new civilization in Civilization VII. You build over your old city, as it were, so that certain structures and buildings from older periods remain visible, just like in a real historical city. It will be interesting to see how that will work in practice.

What we can already see is that the graphical style of the new Civ looks a lot more mature and less cartoonish than that of the previous part. There was also quite a bit of criticism at the time, especially from long-term fans of the series. The game world remains colorful. In the beta version that we played, there were still some small bugs and other rough edges. For example, when the characters appeared large on the screen during diplomatic negotiations, we noticed that they were not very detailed. The animations were also rather wooden, and a lack of contrast and small fonts sometimes made it very difficult to read texts and diagrams. Developer Firaxis still has six months to iron out such matters, so you would think that should be enough.

Preliminary conclusion

The seventh installment in the long-running Civilization series is already causing a stir. After such a long wait since the previous installment, expectations are high. The new installment embraces new gameplay elements and adds much-requested features, but also contains fundamental changes to some aspects of the underlying foundation.

In this preview, we have touched upon the most important changes. However, there is much more. During our play session we saw some information about ‘golden ages’ flash by, which we know from DLC for Civilization VI. That seems to be returning, as well as climate change and the associated natural disasters. At the same time, there are things we have not heard much about, such as whether the AI ​​opponents will show smarter and more varied behavior.

Civilization VII is set to release on February 11, 2025, and will be available immediately for PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and of course PC. The game will cost €70 on all platforms, except for the Switch, where a modified version will cost €60. On that platform, for example, lower limits apply to the number of players.