My practical demo for Sid Meier’s Civilization 7 ended at the turning point of a decisive military operation. At arm’s length from the station, I kept clicking the mouse as I stood up and packed my bag, desperately trying to claim the capital of Ashoka, leader of the Mauryan Empire. As in any promising Civilization campaign, I didn’t want to stop playing, but this particularly bullish rampage was an attempt to get closer to the most drastic change Firaxis Games has made to the Civilization formula in a long time: the introduction of Ages.
Civilization 7 campaigns take place across three distinct eras—Ancient, Exploratory, and Modern—a change made to better reflect the undulating tides of history. Each player’s actions contribute to an Age Progression metric, and at some point this will culminate in an Age Transition, a crisis-ridden period where you’ll decide what to inherit from your existing empire and deal with barbarians at its gates. You’ll keep the same leader throughout all three ages, but the civilization they control will change with each transition, and your options will be determined by your choices up to this point, as well as your geographic and historical connections.
For example, players might pair Pharaoh Hatshepsut with Egypt to start, but if they collect three horse resources during the Ancient Era, they can switch to Mongolia for the Exploration Age. Specific resources, civics, technologies, buildings, units, wonders, and even game systems are age-specific, and the map will expand as you enter a new era, allowing for the introduction of new Independent Powers: Civilization 7‘s humanizing take on barbarians. They are now villages scattered across the world that can grow into formidable city-states, potentially creating a buffer between your civilization and a hostile empire.
“The thesis is that history is built in layers,” said Dennis Shirk, Executive Producer at Firaxis Games. “With Rome, for example, the whole world, particularly in North Africa and Europe, has seeds of Rome woven into their societies, culture and people. Eventually, people change, absorb and grow, and that’s just the natural state of things. But instead of a straight line from point A to point B at the end, Ed (Beach, Creative Director of Civilization 7) wanted to explore that space.”
Across the river from where I was assigned at Gamescom, the ruins of a Roman villa could be found in a parking lot beneath the typically Gothic Cologne Cathedral — a compelling real-world example of the Firaxis theory in action. In that sense, Civilization 7‘s layered approach is thoughtfully archaeological, and in theory will allow players to finish a game with a unique stratigraphic profile of their empire, one that speaks both visually and mechanically to their choices throughout history. A presentation that ached to highlight all this tantalizing historical interaction, but unfortunately I couldn’t get a sense of how this works in practice as my demo was limited to the Ancient era.
As Augustus, I could have chosen Egypt, but I chose Rome instead, building my capital a few hexagons from the coast—a cute and bountiful geographical coincidence. My scouts charged into the unknown, causing hexagonal monoliths to rise and fall, revealing shiny sea tiles blooming with underwater flora. The plant life painted a delicate mirage on the water’s surface, one of many visual flourishes I noticed throughout the game, details that reflect what the game’s art director, Jason Johnson, calls “legible realism.” Another was a flood of bubbling mud that spread across my farmland, the result of a nasty flood that arrived on the turn I discovered Irrigation.
The next thing I noticed was the lack of builder units. As Rome expanded, I physically chose the next tiles to grow to and the associated improvements. This change helped streamline turn time, at least compared to Civilization 6. On the other hand, there’s Influence, a new diplomatic currency that I’ve been spending on frequent pace-sapping pop-up chats with other empires and sanctions during the war, which were explicitly aimed at Ashoka’s agriculture. Broadly speaking, Civilization 7 has a preference for an interruptive dialogue box, much more so than its predecessor, with narrative events reminiscent of Crusader Kings 3 that confront you as you play. Similarly, the ‘goody huts’ of old now ask for a choice that determines what kind of reward you get.
During the 30 or so turns I made, I heard the soothing voice of Gwendoline Christie, who Game of Thrones storytellers from the dynasty of civilization, who took over the duties of Sean Bean, who lent him his Yorkshire tones Civilization 6. Initial, Civilization 7 was going to have a different narrator for each age, but Christie’s early readings made such an impression that Firaxis scrapped the idea. “What struck us was when we got back those first few sessions — and it didn’t matter how small, like a five-word quote — everything was read with heart and feeling; it was like she was performing for an audience every time she read something,” Shirk said.
Image: Firaxis/2K Games
Completing the major changes in Civilization 7 is the introduction of Commanders, military leaders with skill trees that suck up all of your previously delimited unit XP. You can stack six units on a commander tile like a Trojan horse and deploy them in a specific direction to set up a devastating gank on an enemy civ’s border. Or, at least, that’s what I did to begin my tyrannical siege of Ashoka’s capital. “We did it because we hate managing armies in (Civilization) 6“, Shirk said. “The greatest enemy of an army wasn’t the opponent; it was that one hex mountain tile pass you had to get them all through.”
Shirk said the team at Firaxis is internally referring to the Civilization 4/5/6 fighting style called ‘Fish Slap’, where one unit usually runs up to another and hits him with a proverbial fish, then runs away and ends the confrontation. This led to the development of Civilization 7‘continuous combat’ under combat designer Brian Feldges. When units engage in combat, they slam into each other and fight on the plane of the hex they’re in, and the fighting doesn’t stop until you’ve given all of your orders. “We wanted to set up the engagement so that flanking looks and feels good, and when the combat starts, you actually have battle lines fighting in your game while you’re going through and doing all of your combat,” Shirk said. “And then you end your turn, and only then do they go back to their paths.”
In addition to bringing a new strategic dynamic to Civilization 7Fish Slap’s death has also allowed Firaxis to take the contextual visual design of each unit to the next level. Rightly so, Roman archers don’t look the same as Egyptian archers this time around. The visual variety extends to the individual, with certain members of each unit sporting alternate headgear, outfits, and ultimately unique combat damage. It’s a reactive approach that deepens the immersion and speaks to the core ambition of Civilization 7: to distinguish itself from its well-known predecessors.
“If you look at (Civilization 4, 5And 6), they’re all pretty similar,” Shirk said. “We change the rooms, hang new wallpaper, add a few different things or expand the house, but they’re iterative and our fans have gotten so good at guessing what we’re doing. They know what order we’re going to do it in, what’s going to be in the first expansion… and Ed (Beach) didn’t want to Civilization 6.5; he wanted to do something that would force our fans to start over. The old strategies aren’t going to work. They need to open up and look at it with fresh eyes to understand how to play this game.”
