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'Civilization 7 Captures the Chaos of Human History In Manageable Doses' (theguardian.com) 62
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian, written by Julian Benson: It's been eight years since Civilization 6 -- the most recent in a very long-running strategy game series that sees you take a nation from the prehistoric settlement of their first town through centuries of development until they reach the space age. Since 2016 it has amassed an abundance of expansions, scenario packs, new nations, modes and systems for players to master -- but series producer Dennis Shirk at Firaxis Games feels that enough it enough. "It was getting too big for its britches," he says. "It was time to make something new."
"It's tough to even get through the whole game," designer Ed Beach says, singling out the key problem that Firaxis aims to solve with the forthcoming Civilization 7. While the early turns of a campaign in Civilization 6 can be swift, when you're only deciding the actions for the population of a single town, "the number of systems, units, and entities you must manage explodes after a while," Beach says. From turn one to victory, a single campaign can take more than 20 hours, and if you start falling behind other nations, it can be tempting to restart long before you see the endgame. That's why Civilization 7's campaign has been split into three ages -- Antiquity, Exploration and Modern -- with each ending in a dramatic explosion of global crises. "Breaking the game into chapters lets people get through history in a more digestible fashion," Beach says.
When you start a new campaign, you pick a leader and civilization to govern, and direct your people in establishing their first settlements and encounters with the other peoples populating a largely undeveloped land. You'll choose the technologies they research, the expansions they make to their cities, and whom they try to befriend or conquer. Every turn you complete or scientific, economic, cultural and military milestone you pass adds points to a meter running in the background. Once that meter hits 200, you and all the other surviving civilizations on the map will transition into the next age. When moving from Antiquity to Exploration and later Exploration to Modern, you select a new civilization to lead. You'll retain all the cities you controlled before but have access to different technologies and attributes. This may seem strange, but it's built to reflect history: think of London, which was once run by the Romans before being supplanted by the Anglo-Saxons. No empire lasts for ever, but they don't all collapse, either.
Breaking Civilization 7 into chapters also gives campaigns a new rhythm. As you approach the end of an age, you'll begin to face global crises. In Antiquity, for instance, you can see a proliferation of independent powers similar to the tribes that tore down Rome. "We're not calling them barbarians any more," Beach says. "It's a more nuanced way to present them." These crises multiply and strengthen until you reach the next age. "It's like a sci-fi or fantasy series with a huge, crazy conclusion, and then the next book starts nice and calm," Beach says. "There's a point where getting to the next age is a relief." Here's a round-up of thoughts on Civilization 7 from some of the most respected gaming outlets and reviewers:
Civilization VII hands-on: This strategy sequel rethinks the long game -- Ars Technica's Samuel Axon
Civilization 7 pairs seismic changes with a lovably familiar formula -- Eurogamer's Chris Tapsell
Civilization 7 hands-on: Huge changes are coming to the classic strategy series - PC Gamer's Tyler Wilde
Civilization 7 lets you mix and match history -- and it's a blast - The Verge's Ash Parrish
Civilization 7 Hands-On Preview: Creating Your Legacy - Game Rant's Joshua Duckworth
Sid Meier's Civilization VII preview -- possibly the freshest sequel yet - GamesHub's Jam Walker
How Civilization 7 Rethinks The Series' Structure - GameSpot's Steve Watts
"It's tough to even get through the whole game," designer Ed Beach says, singling out the key problem that Firaxis aims to solve with the forthcoming Civilization 7. While the early turns of a campaign in Civilization 6 can be swift, when you're only deciding the actions for the population of a single town, "the number of systems, units, and entities you must manage explodes after a while," Beach says. From turn one to victory, a single campaign can take more than 20 hours, and if you start falling behind other nations, it can be tempting to restart long before you see the endgame. That's why Civilization 7's campaign has been split into three ages -- Antiquity, Exploration and Modern -- with each ending in a dramatic explosion of global crises. "Breaking the game into chapters lets people get through history in a more digestible fashion," Beach says.
When you start a new campaign, you pick a leader and civilization to govern, and direct your people in establishing their first settlements and encounters with the other peoples populating a largely undeveloped land. You'll choose the technologies they research, the expansions they make to their cities, and whom they try to befriend or conquer. Every turn you complete or scientific, economic, cultural and military milestone you pass adds points to a meter running in the background. Once that meter hits 200, you and all the other surviving civilizations on the map will transition into the next age. When moving from Antiquity to Exploration and later Exploration to Modern, you select a new civilization to lead. You'll retain all the cities you controlled before but have access to different technologies and attributes. This may seem strange, but it's built to reflect history: think of London, which was once run by the Romans before being supplanted by the Anglo-Saxons. No empire lasts for ever, but they don't all collapse, either.
Breaking Civilization 7 into chapters also gives campaigns a new rhythm. As you approach the end of an age, you'll begin to face global crises. In Antiquity, for instance, you can see a proliferation of independent powers similar to the tribes that tore down Rome. "We're not calling them barbarians any more," Beach says. "It's a more nuanced way to present them." These crises multiply and strengthen until you reach the next age. "It's like a sci-fi or fantasy series with a huge, crazy conclusion, and then the next book starts nice and calm," Beach says. "There's a point where getting to the next age is a relief." Here's a round-up of thoughts on Civilization 7 from some of the most respected gaming outlets and reviewers:
Civilization VII hands-on: This strategy sequel rethinks the long game -- Ars Technica's Samuel Axon
Civilization 7 pairs seismic changes with a lovably familiar formula -- Eurogamer's Chris Tapsell
Civilization 7 hands-on: Huge changes are coming to the classic strategy series - PC Gamer's Tyler Wilde
Civilization 7 lets you mix and match history -- and it's a blast - The Verge's Ash Parrish
Civilization 7 Hands-On Preview: Creating Your Legacy - Game Rant's Joshua Duckworth
Sid Meier's Civilization VII preview -- possibly the freshest sequel yet - GamesHub's Jam Walker
How Civilization 7 Rethinks The Series' Structure - GameSpot's Steve Watts
Genetics? (Score:2)
Re: Genetics? (Score:3)
Re: Genetics? (Score:1)
Re: Genetics? (Score:2)
Re: Genetics? (Score:3)
Genetics don't work fast enough to keep up with culture, for the most part. And the effects are typically overwhelmed by things like local resources and technology. It's just not all that significant.
Re: Genetics? (Score:2)
I think there might be a few very minor ones, but OC is making it sound like to be accurate Civ should become Eugenics Simulator 2000.
Re: Genetics? (Score:2)
Re: Genetics? (Score:2)
Inuit have evolved additional fats to keep them warm in the Winter. Polynesians evolved the ability to hold their breath longer and dive for clams. The people who act as sherpas (Indians? Nepalese? Tibetans?) have evolved for high altitudes.
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Re: Genetics? (Score:2)
Not necessarily. Geography led to the mutations for the Inuit, for sure, not culture.
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guy just wants to scream "I'M RACIST" but is too much of a coward, so he has to make this pathetic comment on a video game article.
I hope that means the turn wait time is down (Score:4, Insightful)
My biggest problem with Civ VI, and V has this problem too, is that turns take forever to resolve towards the end game while you're waiting for the AI, even if you have fast moves on and such.
One of the great things about the classic Civ games, by which I kind of mean every version prior to V but really mean Civ 2 and let's throw in Alpha C along with it is that you spend almost no time waiting for the AI. I still play a lot of Alpha C because it is so pleasurable to play. You get instant payoffs. I spend more time playing Civ VI, but I probably complete more games of Alpha C. And it has kind of an irritatingly huge end game against the CPU, too, but it's still fast.
Re: I hope that means the turn wait time is down (Score:2)
Re:I hope that means the turn wait time is down (Score:4, Interesting)
There were some older games that worked this way and if you essentially skipped your turn the computer AI wouldn't do anything since it planned all of its moves during the player turn so the less time the player took, the worse the AI would be. The main reason for doing it that way is that computers weren't powerful enough to let the computer opponent process the AI routines quickly enough and the developers didn't want people to have to wait 30 seconds doing nothing. So they looked for spare cycles wherever they could find them and a human might spend minutes on their turn just thinking without doing anything computationally intensive.
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I've never understood why the AI can't do most of its planning while the player is taking their turn
If the AI is truly taking 7-8 seconds to take turn on a modern computer with lots of RAM and a CPU with many cores (like my own), then I'd assert that it's artificially slowing down the end of the turn. There is NO way in hell that there's that much calculations do to in a game the size of Civ VI that the CPU would take 7-8 seconds to do, no matter how many nations (20 even) and how many units they all have (4000, maybe). On the other hand, if it's not truly intelligent and taking a brute force attack, ca
Re:I hope that means the turn wait time is down (Score:4, Informative)
Obviously, I haven't seen under the hood of Civ's source code, so some of this is conjecture, but I would bet it's exploring lots of decision trees as deep as it can. A videogame's "AI" often doesn't mean AI in the sense of classical computer science. For example, agent pathfinding is typically considered part of AI. Even simple state-based decision making is considered "AI". It's not surprising at all that Civ would require a pretty good chunk of CPU times per turn searching for optimal moves as far ahead as it can. Most videogame AI consists of very simple decision-making rules supplemented with brute-force search algorithms. "True" AIs are too unpredictable, too hard to train and adapt for new rule changes, too hard to tweak, etc, so game designers tend not to prefer them.
Source: me, having worked on computer games for over a quarter century, including "AI" programming for videogames.
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In the context of games, AI doesn't necessarily imply neural nets or "truly intelligent" anything like that (though those kind of things can be used). It just means having a robot play, however it gets that done. Brute forcing counts well enough.
I would consider even the simple algorithm used by the ghosts in Pac Man to be a legit gam
Re:I hope that means the turn wait time is down (Score:4, Interesting)
There are no dark ages.
Re: I hope that means the turn wait time is down (Score:3)
It does, and itâ(TM)s more common in later versions (and by the sounds of it even more so in 7). Sometimes internal strife causes a civilisation to either collapse or at least have several of its cities shrink. That presents an opportunity for a less technologically advanced civilisation to take over at least some of the cities, creating a dark age in them.
Remember, the romans didnâ(TM)t go backwards in terms of what technology they had, instead, their civilisation shrank, and different cultures
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There are no dark ages.
I see you haven't played VI.
Re: I hope that means the turn wait time is down (Score:2)
Can you point to when you think technology on a large scale went backwards? The European âoeDark Agesâ is largely a myth. Art, architecture, and engineering continued to evolve. See medieval cathedrals.
Re: I hope that means the turn wait time is down (Score:2)
On my 7 year old gaming PC, the longest I wait in Civ VI is like 5 seconds. Maybe it's time for an upgrade?
Re:I hope that means the turn wait time is down (Score:5, Informative)
My biggest problem with Civ VI, and V has this problem too, is that turns take forever to resolve towards the end game while you're waiting for the AI, even if you have fast moves on and such.
This was due to the underlying Lua scripting engine used in those games, which was single-threaded. If you had a processor that scored well on a single thread rating - end of turn goes much faster. If you had with a poor single thread rating, you'll be waiting forever.
2012 Core i7 - 2071 single thread rating - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/c... [cpubenchmark.net]
2022 7900x - 4261 single thread rating - https://www.cpubenchmark.net/c... [cpubenchmark.net]
I hope they improve their scripting engine in Civ7.
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After getting Civ VI, I upgraded my system to one with a processor that is about 50% faster at single thread than the system I was using. It made no perceptible difference in turn times. I have the game installed on mirrored SSDs and have 32GB RAM. I do not think you can blame the CPU's single thread performance, the bottleneck is somewhere else (and it's not storage either!)
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My biggest problem with Civ VI, and V has this problem too, is that turns take forever to resolve towards the end game while you're waiting for the AI, even if you have fast moves on and such.
One of the great things about the classic Civ games, by which I kind of mean every version prior to V but really mean Civ 2 and let's throw in Alpha C along with it is that you spend almost no time waiting for the AI. I still play a lot of Alpha C because it is so pleasurable to play. You get instant payoffs. I spend more time playing Civ VI, but I probably complete more games of Alpha C. And it has kind of an irritatingly huge end game against the CPU, too, but it's still fast.
Civ V was such a disappointment I still play Civ IV. I never even bothered with Civ VI. I'm not eager to try 7 either.
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I've not played the Civ games in years, because their game mechanics have (if anything) devolved. I find a lot more pleasure in the original (via freeciv).
But there are better, far more complex and nuanced turn based RTS games out there, like Stellaris. It's not even comparable.
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But there are better, far more complex and nuanced turn based RTS games out there, like Stellaris. It's not even comparable.
Stellaris is great if you like micromanagement. Since I don't, I never play it. This story is about reducing micromanagement in the new version. That makes me interested in it.
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Depends on which species you play as. Not all of them are micromanagement heavy.
Apple Trek ! (Score:2)
In Apple Trek, which shipped on tape with the Apple ][, the computer move was set without knowing yours. Both were then executed.
This led to the delightful tactic of moving between a pair of Klingons, and then stepping back out of the way.
This was also the only variant I recall in which the Klingons had photon torpedos.
So when you moved back out of the way, the first Klingon was likely to fire a torpedo and hit the other. Which, if it survived, often returned fire!
Oops, I just dated myself again, didn't I
Re: Apple Trek ! (Score:1)
I feel ripped off. My apple //e didn't come with that , or any games for that matter.
Big Civ fan (Score:2)
I have several versions (with multiple optional add-ons for each) installed on my laptop.
I do enjoy the newer versions play "feel", but... I have never finished it. It just gets too slow and too much micromanaging is required to stay on a target. I have played thru various civilizations in the earlier versions, multiple times, achieving different win conditions each time.
Looking forward to see what they come up with.
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I do enjoy the newer versions play "feel", but... I have never finished it.
You are not alone. I play quite a bit of VI and of late I have been getting achievements which I'm surprised aren't common but are only in the 0.5% range or so, for regular game victories with various leaders. I'm not particularly great at the game so I have the difficulty someplace in the middle most of the time, but it's still pretty fun.
Most importantly about Civ V and VI, I never wonder why a computer player is attacking me, which is my least favorite thing about basically every other version of Civ exc
Just one more turn (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Just one more turn (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Just one more turn (Score:5, Funny)
6 was an expansion pack (Score:3)
Civ 6 really just felt like an expansion pack to 5. Nothing like the leap from 4 to 5.
Maybe Civilization is just a fully-developed game, and it can't be made fundamentally better. I would still be interested in playing a few rounds of the new expansion, but not for $75, not for a game I've been playing for 15 years and bought multiple times already.
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I'll add that some of the expansions for 6 felt like steps backward. Trade routes were cool, but the way you're forced to micromanage them is total ass, especially in endgame war scenarios. Other features had mechanics just weren't fun, felt tacked-on, and didn't integrate well with the rest of the game.
I would say Peak Civ was probably somewhere late in the Civ 5 era.
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Yeah, CivV with Brave New World is peak Civ.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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shut up dude.
Spyware (Score:2, Insightful)
Does it still have the Civ6 spyware?
Sounds like Humankind (Score:3)
Re: Sounds like Humankind (Score:1)
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You really aren't. It bogs you down in micro more than civ 4/5/6 does and has a bad habit of not clearly explaining what/why things are happening. I wanted to like it -- I mean I like endless space 1 and 2. I didn't really get into endless legend though which might have been a bad sign.
I'm hopeful Firaxis has this under control, but I'm a lot more concerned with 7 than I was when 6 was coming out. 6 was very much iterative on 5. 7 looks more revolutionary and I'm not sure that's a good thing.
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Civilization == Manageable Doses of Control (Score:2)
What else is there? Make it not quite too painful to manage . . . Civilization!!!
Thanks, Sid.
Civ 5 = Game Civ 6 = Job (Score:4, Informative)
I own 5 and 6. I still play five.
Six was so boring, it felt like it was a office job.
Another thing, I never really got past the awful graphics, the weird-looking characters with like 1000 options on how to respond.
Civ V had a tech tree. Civ 6 had multiple trees.
Make a game so complicated that it's boring to play.
Civ V, is still so playable. So much so that the last time I looked, it was more expensive on STEAM than VI.
I'm not the only one here thinking this.
FYI, I stared with Civilization, (1) the first.
With that in mind, I'll wait 5 or 6 years until all of the DLC for 7 are completed and all of the reviews are in, before I sink 100 hours into a boring game waiting for it to be fun. (I've been playing V, on and off for more than a decade.)
Re:Civ 5 = Game Civ 6 = Job (Score:4, Informative)
The DLCs/expansions for 6 tended to make it worse. Tacked-on mechanics that don't integrate with the rest of the game, added just to say "we added something". Leading, eventually, to the overly complex, not-fun experience of Civ 6.
By comparison, 5 is elegant and balanced. Definitely the Civ to start with if you haven't played any of them.
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The DLCs/expansions for 6 tended to make it worse.
You can simply untick checkboxes while setting up your game to avoid any of the addon crap you don't like. In fact, none of it is turned on by default, except sometimes in monthly challenges. But VI does have a lot more leaders than V, especially now that they've added some.
I usually also disable religious and cultural victories because I think they are stupid. They should be meta-victories only, in that they should help you achieve other types of victories only. And if you disable them as win conditions, t
Hoping for diplomacy improvements (Score:3)
Civ has never really been a true grand strategy game, but I'd really like they finally improve diplomacy a bit. I mean, there is no way in any of the Civ's 1-6 to have any nuances beyond "we hate you, this means war" and "please let's stop fighting". Granted, they added Vassal states, but that's again a complete submission of another Civ.
I mean, you cannot do what real-world China is doing right now in South China Sea, or Russia for the past 15 or so years (until actual war started in Ukraine), or US in South America during cold war, i.e. heavily leaning on your neighbors and telling them what to do or accidents might happen.
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Sounds fun (Score:1)
While we'd disagree on details, I think a lot of people would agree these kind of games need some kind of shakeup. In SMACX (a game dear to my heart) there was always a point when you knew you'd won, and you'd only get more powerful at a higher rate than everyone else combined. Something has to be done about the endgame.
I'm glad that smart people are thinking about how to inject creativity.
Will we get to play it on Linux, like we did with Loki's SMACX port?
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Will we get to play it on Linux, like we did with Loki's SMACX port?
Have you tried running any of the Loki games on modern Linux? Last time I tried, even Loki_Compat didn't make literally any of them work. I just gave up and installed the Windows versions in Proton using either PlayOnLinux or Lutris. The Windows version of SMAC is better anyway, even if for no reason other than the Linux version not having the option to tell formers to improve only the area around their host city. You do need to install one of the patches to make it work properly, but that's true if you try
Can't wait (Score:5, Funny)
to get nuked by Ghandi again.
EU4 has largely replaced Civ for me (Score:5, Informative)
It just sucks that the pricing structure makes it so completely unapproachable for new players, it's very hard to get your friends into it. The base game is completely screwy, you need> certain DLCs for it to actually be feature-complete. Honestly, they shouldn't even offer it in that state, it just gives a bad impression. The starter edition sometimes goes on sale for $25 or so and has everything that's strictly necessary, so that's not too bad, but the game is pretty barren without the immersion and flavor packs, and if you want all of those you're looking well into triple digits outside of sales. That's not an easy sell. You can pick and choose which packs you want for the nations they cover, but that's not something you can determine at a glance; for example, Lions of the North focused on Scandinavia but also had substantial changes to plenty of other nations. So if you're into Prussia for example, it's not exactly clear which DLC you need in order to get the "full" experience; it's easier to just buy the complete pack. They do have a monthly subscription that unlocks everything but I refuse to ever recommend subscriptions to anyone; they just need to fix their offerings and pricing.
Civ2 - Expand! (Score:1)