I have more time recorded on Civilization VI than any
other game in my library. It's been my go-to game to play with
Liz
since it launched. Before that, I played nearly endless
amounts of Civilization II and III, and
plenty of IV, Alpha Centauri, and
Beyond Earth as well. This is probably the single
series of games I have maintained the most interest in across
my whole life.
So, naturally, we pounced on the opportunity to pay some extra
money up-front for guaranteed access to the first two
Civ VII DLCs as well as a chance to play the game a
week ahead of its official launch. Of course, these games are
always a bit shaky at the beginning, before patches balance
out uneven mechanics and DLC adds depth to places that are
shallow in the base game. We went into this knowing that we'd
need to keep our patience close at hand.
But patience alone wasn't enough to get us through the game as
shipped. Civ VII is direly underbaked, missing
critical user interface affordances at every turn―most of
which have been established standards for generations of
Civilization games!—and in some cases being so opaque
as to be nearly unplayable. At the same time, it's incredibly
ambitious, making major overhauls to the formula that are
aimed at addressing flaws that one might consider inextricable
from the 4X genre. The result is something that was bound to
be polarizing even if it worked.
Dramatic Changes in Civilization VII
The moment-to-moment mechanics of Civ VII look
familiar to anyone familiar with the franchise. You still have
cities and units on a game board, which still uses the
hexagonal tiles introduced in Civ V. You can build
buildings in your cities, explore the map, work your way
through parallel trees of technology and civics, and pursue
either diplomacy or war with other nations you encounter. But
the details of almost all these systems have been changed
dramatically.
Improvements Without Builders
One of the earliest things one notices upon starting a game of
Civ VII is that there's no equivalent to the Builder
or Worker unit from previous games. Instead, tiles are
improved as part of a city's growth. Each time a city gains a
population, it can improve one tile, also growing its borders
to include the adjacent tiles (if they aren't too far from the
city center). Gone is the choice between mining or farming a
grassy hill; each terrain type has exactly one improvement
which is automatically applied. Later in the game, you can
unlock "unique improvements" which further enhance improved
tiles, but these must be built or purchased like buildings.
This immediately gestures at one of the game's core design
goals: to mitigate the micromanagement that blossoms as the
game wears on. Civ VI already took a gentler stand on
this, moving from immortal Workers to Builders that have
limited charges. But doing away with this unit type entirely
means that the mid- to…
