Sid Meier's Civilization

[Foxxo]

Fuck.


I'm not sure how to feel about this.

Plus they're using the wrong word; in 4, you got a Military Victory by rushing down your competitors, and a Domination Victory by outscaling everyone else in the late game (once Military Victory became otherwise just a waste of time).

I know nothing about how you get a Military Victory in 7, though, so it might very well be more in-line with Civ 4 Domination Victory.

 

[Smashed & Slamed]

Ara just had another update and because it's We Wuz Kangs month they added Harriet Tubman. I guess I won't need to shill 110 USD for Civ VII. We got people who shouldn't be Civ Leaders at home.

 

[PaulPaulson]

I love how hard they try to replace all the leaders with women and/or niggers for having even the most minor impact, and present them as standing on even ground with some of the most influential leaders in human history. Really makes the new game feel historical.

 

[The Pierrot]

View attachment 6965606
Ara just had another update and because it's We Wuz Kangs month they added Harriet Tubman. I guess I won't need to shill 110 USD for Civ VII. We got people who shouldn't be Civ Leaders at home.

As dumb as it is to see it happen again (and a bit odd that now that's two games within the same timeframe using the exact same non-leader)... I will admit that at least Ara presents it relatively better both design-wise and in terms of gameplay mechanics. It's still utterly bizarre that Civ decided that she's probably gonna be one of the leaders who's most likely to start picking fights with everyone by making her military-oriented.

 

[Smashed & Slamed]

Decided to check the forum for the Harriet Tubman announcement thinking there will be a date for the update. The entire thing is people making fun of them. I have finished archiving everything. I wonder if the jannies will clean it up.

Spoiler: Pages 2-7

Spoiler: Archive Links

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[King Murchad Big Groypers]

Because borders mostly non-alterable in V there's a land-rush aspect to it that ironically isn't as present in 4, while putting a hard limit on the ability of a city to gather resources from nearby tiles means there's always an 'optimal' spacing that may or may not be reflective of the actual reality of the map you're given.

I think some amount of potential for optimization is healthy and needed for a game like Civ: if two cities have three tiles of overlap with each other it's not the end of the world and they can still grow to be functional lategame. There are costs as well to having all your cities be the optimal 6 tile distance from each other, such as potentially having no inner ring resources or having an imbalance of food vs production, or your outer ring resources being snatched up by other civs that settled more cautiously.

There are countless subtle changes that can be made that would greatly help the tall vs wide problem.
Something even like the trend of faster game speeds itself favors wider play. Percentage bonuses from policies, natural wonders, amenities, district scaling costs, and buildings are less impactful on quicker speeds, because a +15% Production bonus to military units that take an average of 3 turns to build is much less able to be "felt" than that same bonus on a speed where units take an average of 12 turns to be built. Slower game speeds allow for good decisions to compound and allows for larger disparities to occur over the course of the game. Think of being ahead by 10 techs instead of 2 and having your military tech advantage lasting for an entire war. This is of course an impossible problem to "solve", as you can't force slower game speeds of people, but still.

Portugal's Feitoria ability from Civ 5 is a good model I think. Building improvements in City-States that give you resources is an alternative form of expansion that's intensive rather than extensive. I think that the situation of running out of buildings to build should be a very rare occurence in Civ games, and that there should always exist the dynamic of weighing the tradeoffs between building infrastructure, units, or things like City Projects from 6 which should be expanded upon. While Tall play should never be objectively better than Wide and the best choice to make every game, there should still be some areas where it has a natural advantage over Wide.

And of course Civ doesn't really do a good job of representing how any colonization post-classical period functioned, there's no New World or continents with tech disparities (even mods that do a good job balancing like 5's Vox Populi are guilty of worsening this - can't have any bellcurves in our history games), you can't have enclaves/leases in other civilizations, towns will never naturally grow into cities of their own, etc.

The issue of early modern colonization is one where the history is in direct conflict with the game. Having mid-game colonization be able to catch up with and even surpass early game settlement is a complete non-starter, and vassal-like relationships are another: in a competitive multiplayer environment the vassalized player has just lost, and continuing to play would just be a humiliation ritual for them.

I could see it functioning in a way that appeases both camps. Expand city-states into being "Minor Civilizations" or something like that, having 3-5 cities and expanded diplomacy. That could represent 19th century style colonialism and 20th century Cold War gameplay very well. Have cities in the New World/Distant Lands be hit with a "native resistance" malus to growth, making migration of surplus pops from the Old World the main way to grow colonies. Have the Industrial era trigger revolutions that'll turn most colonies into independent minor civs, opening up new frontiers for competition while also providing rubberbanding & balance for the lategame.

Point is, there's a lot of ways to satisfy many types of players at once. You can allow for wide and tall at the same time, and allow for history and competitive gameplay at the same time. They don't have to be mutually exclusive.

I think the biggest crime of the shift in mentality from 4 to 5 was cutting off any possibility of building on some of the ideas 4 had for that. Borders naturally changing over time and being able to grow towns and somewhat customize their output based on buildings and civics was ironically a better way to make tall play more rewarding than hard-and-fast punishing you for expanding to quickly in 5 because the alternative is half the world think you were a warmonger for just wanting that one luxury.

Borders being static I do find very annoying. Purchasing a three tile salient into my territory then culture bombing with a citadel will never not be retarded. Dynamicism and some amount of uncertainty forcing players to always be on their toes will always be more preferable to static mono-strategies like ICS or Tradition's three cities only.
However, Civ 6 and 7's policy card system is a bit too far in the other direction imo. You shouldn't be able to change your entire government's bonuses on every civic unlock and totally shift your civ's orientation. My ideal is adaptability over the course of a campaign. Going for culture early game but shifting to domination midgame but then finally transitioning into going for a diplomatic victory, that sort of thing.

As dumb as it is to see it happen again (and a bit odd that now that's two games within the same timeframe using the exact same non-leader)... I will admit that at least Ara presents it relatively better both design-wise and in terms of gameplay mechanics. It's still utterly bizarre that Civ decided that she's probably gonna be one of the leaders who's most likely to start picking fights with everyone by making her military-oriented.

It baffles the mind. There are countless historically relevant black male leaders (such as Frederick Douglass, I doubt there would have been any serious objection if he was the American leader alongside Ben Franklin) and female leaders (yet they still choose ridiculous ones like Ada Lovelace, Catherine de Medici, and Kristina) out there. The obsession with black women which are central to their religion leads them to pick irrelevant whos over more actually relevant yet never chosen leaders, it's absurd.

 

[Smashed & Slamed]

It baffles the mind. There are countless historically relevant black male leaders (such as Frederick Douglass, I doubt there would have been any serious objection if he was the American leader alongside Ben Franklin) and female leaders (yet they still choose ridiculous ones like Ada Lovelace, Catherine de Medici, and Kristina) out there. The obsession with black women which are central to their religion leads them to pick irrelevant whos over more actually relevant yet never chosen leaders, it's absurd.

I don't get why no 4X game like Civ has added Madagascar and her Queen as a leader/civ combo. She fought of whitey during her reign and is black. Why do they add either some random tribal from the 1600s or a minor rebel.

 

[Kane Lives]

I don't get why no 4X game like Civ has added Madagascar and her Queen as a leader/civ combo. She fought of whitey during her reign and is black. Why do they add either some random tribal from the 1600s or a minor rebel.

You imply American devs actually study history lol, or actually care about blacks.

 

[The Big A]

You imply American devs actually study history lol, or actually care about blacks.

I assure you, these individuals have two gods, black people and homosexuals.

 

[Mukhrani]

The Civ switching could have worked so much better and made so much more sense if you picked a broad cultural group to start with, had your own roster of leaders from which you picked, and then moved down a branching tree. For example, Bantu could be a cultural group, Celtic could be another, East Asian, Turkic, Mongol, Slavic, Western, Arabic, Persian. Then have the little cultures that never went anywhere be little city-state like entities. Within each broad cultural group have different options for each era. For example, the Arabs could go through the Umayyads, the Abbasids, or the Fatimids, etc. in the Middle Ages/Age of Exploration. Then in the modern era you could do an ideological divergence: your empire could become Ba'athist, Wahhabist, or some other more parallel historical ideologies. All those Civs could pick from a stable of leaders like Abd al-Rahman, al Mansur, Mu'awiya I, Harun al-Rashid, and Rasad (see, you can find a historically relevant black woman who actually served as a de facto ruler to make a leader, Firaxis!). You could repeat these, with some Civs being choices for multiple cultures - Ilkhanate could be 'evolve' from Arab, Persian, or Mongol culture for example.

 

[Kane Lives]

I assure you, these individuals have two gods, black people and homosexuals.

I agree and disagree.

Yes, black people feature in their worship, but when you mention black people, they don't think of the natives that make up West Africa or whatever. What they worship is the liberal version of the American nigger, complete with niggerrap, hood crime and yas kween slay that has no relation to African blacks whatsoever. So niggers like Tubman (and the eventual Floyd tribute, mark my words) gets an outsized mention, real African leaders like Shaka or said Madagascar Queen don't even feature in their thinking.

 

[Foxxo]

Well, I have bought the physical edition of Civilization VII for the Switch.

First Impressions

There's no box-art on the inside cover, and nothing that describes the game on the outside cover. Nintendo truly is the last company to care about Switch games.

The physical edition is essentially a scam. It's the exact same cartridge size as Pokémon Brilliant Diamond, a game which had the immense controversy of disguising its entire postgame and soundtrack as a Day-1 patch so it could ship on a less-expensive cartridge... and just like back then, it prompts you to a Day-1 patch here, even though Friaxis has outright said that there's no Day-1 patch for consoles yet because their porters are retarded (as in, physically slow).

After I blow that off and start the game, a screen pops up, demanding that I install the patch; fortunately, I can just press "Later" and continue. After a twenty-second black screen, Take-Two puts its DRM agreement in my face, and simply scrolling through that is a laggy experience. Part of the DRM agreement mentions microtransactions. The game will not let you play at all if you don't press "A" to accept the agreement. Afterwards is a Privacy Policy agreement that you must also accept before you can do anything.

After the Privacy Policy agreement is accepted, the game puts you through a rigmarole of accessibility windows on a black screen. Are you just red-colorblind, red-and-green-colorblind, or completely colorblind? How lop-sided is your hearing? How deaf are you? Do you need subtitles? (Why isn't this stuff just in an Options menu in-game?) Amazingly, while you can change the colorblindness options, the window for audio accessibility settings doesn't even work; you just have to move on by pressing "X". It's a complete waste of time in its patchless state.

The title screen animation is very nice, though it stutters a little. It flies by a lot faster than Civ 6's still-screen bullshit. Gwendolyn Christie narrates the silly-but-hyper-realistic cutscene after the title screen animation, which shows one Vietnamese peasant tilling up a sword, seeing himself and others in past lives across the world, and then completely missing that Vietnam has stolen NASA's space program and is doing the first Moon mission.

The actual title screen has one of the leaders you have unlocked (in my case Benjamin Franklin) staring at the menu options, fidgeting about as he (or I suppose she for some people) waits for you to fucking choose something. There's no Civilopedia access from this screen, though; the options are "New Game", "Load Game", "Multiplayer", "Collection" (view the DLC you've bought), "Additional Content" (view the DLC you can buy), and "Options". Once I try selecting "Collection", it prompts me to install the Day-1 patch AGAIN; when I decline, it takes me to the Storefront, which is hilariously empty.

New Game

I select "New Game", and SHOCKINGLY the game doesn't ask me for the Day-1 patch again. I immediately notice that the leaders all have levels beneath their portraits, which all start at 1 (of course). Yes, these bastards start out somewhat-bad, and you have to play as them to unlock Mementos that you can slot into them, presumably getting to mix-and-match them at a certain level of grinding. Aside from taking a half-second to load, the leaders all look very nice, which is weird because a bunch of the portraits have unflattering or oddly-lit angles. The available options at first are:

- Amina of Zazzau, because all sub-Saharan African cultures are exactly the same to Friaxis
- Ashoka after he converted to Buddhism
- Augustus (after he became Emperor, of course) <- okay, he looks kinda off-putting.
- Benjamin Franklin right after he called himself "American" at British Parliament
- Catherine the Great - honestly, I'm surprised that Russia is in this game
- Charlemagne of the Franks
- Confucius, who has only two lines for his Leader abilities - he's the Tall leader, despite China being China
- Frederick the Great
- The Dark One - hilariously, her second trait is that she is more justified than other leaders in declaring revenge wars
- Hatshepsut - Thank God it's not Cleopatra again
- Himiko of Wa - she's basically one of the first confirmed rulers the Chinese found in Japan
- Ibn Battuta - I already spoke about him; his traits remind me of Civ VI America
- Queen Isabella of Castile, after Columbus raped Hispañola
- José Rizal, the national hero of a nation that isn't in the fucking game (though I'm sure it'll be in the DLC Atomic Age)
- Lafayette, after the French Revolution instituted Constitutional Monarchy (and before everything went to pot)
- Machiavelli - his traits basically encourage him to be an asshole
- Pachacuti, Inca-Man
- Trung Trac, one of the two Vietnamese queens who ruled between China's first and second rapes of Vietnam
- and Xerxses, though honestly I'd prefer if he looked like the Xerxes in 300.

One thing I dislike about the UI in this part is that, if you press "L" to scroll left while already at the leftmost menu, you go back to the title screen and your setup is lost. I imagine that pressing "R" to scroll right while already in the rightmost menu immediately starts the game; it doesn't work for me without the Day-1 patch, though, because the last menu is locked to me. I'm not allowed to pick my Age to start in, nor the Difficulty, nor the map type. Hopefully the patch I'm being arm-twisted into installing will allow me these basic features.

I chose Xerxes (because he was the last one), and it listed two "Geographic Choices" for him: Persia (because he ruled Persia), and Maurya (because India is next to Persia). Immediately I notice that Aksum (Coptic Ethiopia) cannot become the Abbasids in the Exploration Age, so I guess there's that historical tid-bit. Civ VII appears to load quicker than Civ VI, but the introductory page during the loading is horrific, with icons slowly popping in like pictures on DSL.

Starting the New Game

The "Welcome to Civ VII" tutorial enters the screen like it's from a mobile game. The split-second screen I see before this tutorial pop-up looks heinously generic; it almost looks like the Steam Store preview of any other grand-strategy-game on the market right now, such as Old World or Humankind.

Page 1 of this bullshit is innocuous enough. I have advisors! As in, multiple advisors, and not just that old lady from VI! (I hope.) Also, there's a Civilopedia; it's weird that I can't access this from the main menu, but honestly my expectations were so low that I didn't think this game would have it.

Page 2 of this bullshit justifies the new Ages mechanic. Sigh. Page 3 explains the Legacy Paths, which I already know from IGN articles to be just a stricter version of the Ages system from Civ VI: Rise and Fall. It also says that you cannot win the game early; you must be in the Modern Age to win the game, and you must engage with the Legacy Paths system in the Modern Age before you can be eligible for victory.

• I know from that same IGN article that Legacy Paths are also used as a tiebreaker, in the event that the Modern Age ends without a winner. I also know from a different article that this system is fucked for console players; completing a Legacy Path milestone advances history towards the next Age or the end of the game, and completing an entire Legacy Path in the Modern Age (thus letting you aim for Victory) also advances history towards an immediate end of the game, but the PC players of the real Day-1 patch don't have to worry about the latter thing.

Page 4 of this bullshit basically restates page 1.

The fog-of-war is back to being darkness in this one. The unexplored hexes are a black-stone hexboard, which is stylistically neat; they're not beating the "wannabe board game" allegations with this one, though. I think it's not quite as nice as the sea-monster map in VI, but it's infinitely better than the CPU-fucking gray fog in V. The explored tiles sort-of look like they've been placed on this mess.

The pooled resources in VII are Gold (of course) and Influence (from Stellaris). The other, "transient" resources are Science, Culture, and... Happiness. Yes, you harvest Happiness in this game. I hope that the Atomic Age DLC lets me build goyslop tile improvements to enhance my Happiness farming. The Gold icon now has a reverse of a 7 stamped on it, which is very nice, but otherwise the Resource icons look a bit corporatized. Also, Food is Corn again. Production is no longer even tangentially orange, for orange is now the color of Happiness, which looks a bit too much like a Facebook/Instagram emoji for my tastes.

No longer do you start with a Warrior to go with your first Settler, who is now called a "Founder". Unit menus now have big squares that list their HP and Movement Points as fractions, which I'm sure some Excel-spreadsheet-user is gleeful about. My Founder founds the first city, Parsa (Persis or Persopolis or something), and immediately I notice that the buildings look rather nice for the year 4000 B.C.; oh well, maybe the spaceship he fell out of to land on this map gave him some building kits. BCE is gay, by the way. It implies we're going to have a third era at some point. What would we call years then? "ACE"?

Also, I have a Settlement Cap in this game; 4, because I'm Xerxes. I sure hope that's not a hard cap. I hope Wide players aren't slitting their wrists about this.

My City's First Steps

I am prompted to Produce something. There's a command to "View Hidden" options, so I take that, and... well... it shows me seemingly every option available to the Antiquity Age. The Advisors from V are back; my goodness, I was missing their little inputs. Unfortunately they don't have actual bodies, and the "Economic Advisor Recommendation" text pokes right off the text box, with just some awkward cropping to hide the second half of the "n".

The icon for the Warrior is a gladius. This gives me a bit of a stroke, because I haven't researched metalworking yet. Also, the icon for Offensive Power is three meteors. Scouts have no power listed in this game, but I imagine that they have Defensive Power like the Founder; if so, they probably have 10 (just like him), or maybe 20 (to match the Warriors). Scouts and Warriors are both disgustingly cheap, so I'm worried that I might be in a Demo Mode due to refusing the Day-1 patch. I also notice that, to build a Settler, my City (which has a starting Population of 1) needs a Population of 5 or higher.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Rasad (see, you can find a historically relevant black woman who actually served as a de facto ruler to make a leader, Firaxis!).

Very interesting
Thank you

And I have suggested before the idea of having husband-and-wife couples as leaders (pose them together) as a more historical way of doing it. Justinian AND Theodora, for example. Roxelana is an obvious but less-known option for a female leader for Turks. But that's not what it's about, they don't this stuff in good faith.

 

[Fig Kommandant]

he's the Tall leader, despite China being China

Having a tall leader for China would be a nice twist if it had stuff like the Three Kingdom or the Five Dynasties Eras as a possible civilizational shift.

 

[Foxxo]

Should I break up my narration of my experience by doing stuff later as a different post? I think I've been staring at my Switch for too long.

I should state that, while elements of this game look generic, it does look pretty nice; maybe I shouldn't have said "hideously". On the other hand, maybe my sense of taste is evacuating from my body.

It runs better on the Switch than VI. VI had a more unique style, though, bright and fun. I'm not sure which game I like more, though (to be honest) it's been two hours and I haven't finished Turn 1 yet.

 

[Foxxo]

The Civilopedia is woefully incomplete without the Day-1 patch, with laughable half-sentence summaries of the Ages. It doesn't have City-States in it, either, or long paragraphs about the Pantheons. This leads me to believe that I am indeed playing a tutorial/demo I spent $60 on.

It does describe the Crises (plural of Crisis) and victories of the game, though. The current Crises for Antiquity are Plagues, Invasion, and Revolts. The current Crises for Exploration are Plagues, Religious Wars, and Revolts. I'm sure that the Exploration-Age Revolts are distinct from the Antiquity-Age Revolts somehow; they're called "Revolutions", after all. Still, having a Bronze-Age-Collapse-style crisis at the end of Antiquity is weird... outside of China, anyway.

The Victories are the following:

1. Military: Conduct a formal test of your nuclear weapons, and reveal to the world what you've got. Your nuclear weapons can be tested on your neighbors, but that doesn't count towards this Victory condition, because Friaxis doesn't have a sense of humor. Your Military Legacy Path Points can be spent on bullying the Oppenheimers into finishing their bombs faster.
2. Economic: End the Gold Standard and make your fiat currency that of the world's, by flexing the infinite money glitch of Keynesian Economics in every capital. No, I'm not joking. While you have John Maynard Keynes, you need to buy the souls of every other nation by spending Gold and Influence in their capitals. It sounds like parody.
3. Cultural: Host the World's Fair. It's a Construction project. Basically, you get Artifacts from (presumably) every corner and Age of the world during the Modern Age, so that you can make hilarious caricatures of every other nation in one of your cities, thus showing that you are the Chad and they are the Grug Soyjaks. Your Cultural Legacy Path Points serve as an aura of superiority that lets you build the World's Fair faster.
4. Science: Be the first nation to put a man in space without killing him. They just had to give one of these Victories to the Soviets, those bastards. This is the typical Science Victory in Civilization, except that (compared to in IV, V, and VI) it's scaled down by around half. Your Scientific Legacy Path Points let you build the two stages faster.
5. Score: If the game ends with no Victory, the winner is whoever has the most Legacy Path Points remaining. Thus, nuking your friends (but not enough to knock them out of the game) might actually put you beneath them in score. The game is advanced towards completion whenever a player gets closer to Victory. Those who pre-ordered the game didn't like that the game sometimes ended on them right when they unlocked the last step towards Victory; thus, the Day-1 patch for PC (and not the abomination people who bought the physical edition have to install) makes it so that unlocking the final projects towards Victory no longer moves the clock forward.

Should I point out that these victories are all pretty similar? Well, aside from the Economic Victory; they weren't actually allowed to make it similar to the other three, because the Economic Victory in Civilization Revolution is just building a World Bank after collecting $2,000.

Eff it, I'm installing the patch while my Switch charges. I can always jack around on another profile if I miss the virgin release. Oh wait, no, it started downloading and installing the patch on its own, while I looked away.

 

[Catboy Ranch]

This is the first time ever I think the western dev team smells worse than the pajeets in the back.

 

[Sho'nuff]

I've been playing since early release. I haven't play Civ6, never really gave it a shot and just missed out on the whole game essentially. But civ 4 and civ 5 were my jams with friends when I was in the military. We loved playing epic length games over the weekend.

Regardless, I've been enjoying my time and I like the new direction of the game... but its definitely feels more like a proof of concept and not a fully fleshed out idea.
Because the UI issues keep ruining my games near the end of a 250 turn antiquity era I've been running into the crisis period a few times. It's a neat concept but picking what happens via cards really takes the teeth out of it. And the era just ends, in the middle of a massive war, era just ends... it's jarring. And while I do enjoy the concept of the exploration age it's definitely negatively effecting map design.
The game feels like a very good early access game.

 

[Catboy Ranch]

Nick Fuentes even takes a stab at C7:

https://x.com/NickJFuentes/status/1889419186767540324

 

[Markass the Worst]

Nick Fuentes even takes a stab at C7:

View attachment 6972447

https://x.com/NickJFuentes/status/1889419186767540324