Sid Meier's Civilization 7, the next entry in the long-running strategy franchise, is shaping up to be a massive departure from everything that came before it. The upcoming game will feature a dramatically overhauled civilization system that will allow you to mix and match leaders and cultures to create your own unique take on history.
Each playthrough will also be split into distinct eras: the Antiquity Age, Exploration Age, and Modern Age. All three present their own challenges, with exclusive civilizations to play in addition to period-appropriate resources, civics, technologies, buildings, and units to discover. The transitions between these eras will offer the chance to select a fresh civilization, with a range of options determined by your previous choices. Those who start as ancient Egypt in the Antiquity Age, for example, might soon find themselves presented with the opportunity to command the Shawnee once the Exploration Age is underway.
Speaking to Dennis Shirk, series veteran and executive producer of Civilization 7 at developer Firaxis Games, following a brief hands-on session at Gamescom 2024, I’m eager to find out what these new features will add to the overall experience.
Layers of history
“It's one of the biggest changes we've made to the game and one of the scariest in terms of changing Civilization, something that's so consistent,” Shirk explains, “that point A to point B leader and civ all the time is not the way it was in the real world and [creative director Ed Beach] really wanted to try to model that.”
“He used ancient Rome, the Roman Empire, as his prime example when he pitched the game. In antiquity, for example, you have ancient Rome in the real world expanding new ideas, advancing, having their own golden ages, as a gameplay term so to speak, and eventually they got too big. Internal crises hit, corruption, economic crises, could be plague. They had barbarians at the gates who came in, invaded, split the empire, and eventually scattered to the wind,” he continues. “Those seeds of Romanism, the Roman Empire are everywhere, throughout Europe, North Africa, and some places in the rest of the world.”
Although it will allow for some unconventional combinations, the intention is for these ages and transitions to reflect “how the people and the culture traveled and traversed the globe and the influences they had on each other” in real life.
In addition to changing your civilization, ages will also affect your chosen leader. “Leaders have their own abilities, separate from the civs,” Shirk says. “Each leader has an attribute tree that is unique to them. So you can actually tailor your leader as you play through all three ages.
“You're going to continue to fine tune that leader based on attributes that you earn through playing and make them something a little bit more unique. We've also added in alternative leaders, leaders in their fields that are visionary and awesome in their particular fields of play. This allows us to include a lot more personalities than we've been able to before. The further back you go in history, it's mainly bearded men, and this allows us to have a lot more of a selection in that process and a lot more ‘What if’ scenarios for the player.”
The three distinct ages will also dramatically affect the overall pace and flow of Civilization 7. “Everybody likes playing the first 100 turns of Civ,” Shirk begins, detailing some telemetry data that shows many players tend to “stop and start over to play through that Age of Discovery again.” By focusing on three clearly defined eras, every age can now offer a similar sense of discovery and excitement.
“In the first age you can't cross the oceans, but you're exploring your continent. Then the Second Age opens up. You get to another advanced level of shipbuilding, for example, and now you can traverse the oceans. You're trying to find the New World, and there's other civilizations there that you're going to meet for the first time. Then in the Modern Age, we're going to have something similar, this new sense of discovery,” he says.
It’s a complex system that Shirk believes was put together “with care and with time and with effort” and “means that we have a whole new experience for our fans.” He warns that “something that worked in Civ 4, 5, and 6 will not work this time,” and that Civilization 7 is “a new puzzle to unlock.”
An even playing field
Civilization 7 might dramatically alter the series formula, but it’s some of the smaller changes that will likely be the most enticing for long-time fans. “One of our [design] pillars is making sure that all decisions should be interesting,” Shirk reveals, “we can't catch them all, but we can certainly sweep a lot up.”
The new commander system is a key example of this, removing many of the frustrations associated with maintaining a large army. “When you have like 40 different units spread across the map, commanders group up these armies and move them easily and deploy them somewhere else,” he says.
“Orders to focus fire so that you can simply press one button and have all the ranged units in your army and that sphere of influence fire at the same target, the ability to reinforce easily from far away, the ability to pack up an army and camp it somewhere so that you can use it when you need to without having units scattered and cluttering up your territory. All of these things were to alleviate some of the tedium that you get when you're managing an empire.”
Shirk also details how the Ages system will ensure a more enjoyable experience in a multiplayer setting: “In the Modern Age [in past games], sometimes because it's snowballed so much you're so far ahead that you're just getting through the turns to get to the victory. Nobody's going to catch up. With the Ages system [...] you're always playing with other civilizations at the height of their power.”
Rather than each civilization having abilities that are only useful at certain points in a long match, now: “you're no longer playing perhaps a people that already had their uniques passed by. You actually have a new challenge, because they have a new set of unique units. You have people that are relatively on par with where you're at. Even though you have a leg up, you might have come through really well from the last Age, [...] we like to think that by doing this, we're giving you new and interesting decisions with each separate age. No more of the tedium. You might have some snowballing, because you're playing very well, but not nearly as much as you've had in the past."
While my time with the game was too brief to come to a definitive conclusion, I did notice that much of Civilization 7 felt pleasantly streamlined and intuitive. I’m excited to discover what else it will bring to the table when it launches for PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch on February 6, 2025.
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