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…