Civilization 7

faille

Molten Core Raider
1,870
470
so I'm sitting at 80 ish hours, but some of that is idle time.

It will come as a shock to no one that the game is pretty broken. There's a lot going on which can make it very confusing but that doesn't mean it's actually complex. I think it's a fairly simple game, quite a few step backs in fact. This is clear from the adjacency, which seems like there's a lot of them and plenty of scope for interaction but when they can be summed up as:
Water tiles for Gold and Food buildings
Mountains for Happiness and Culture buildings
Resources for Science and Production buildings
then I think it's actually a pretty simple.

The age system seems like a good idea, which each age presenting you with difference paths to victory, but in reality each game will end up the same. In age 1 and 2, you gain points to carry over to the next age for how far along each path you get. While reaching the end of a path provides a big boost, it doesn't result in victory for that age, although it help speeds it up. In practice, this means your best strategy is to progress as far along all the paths as you can, idealling reaching the end in all of them. This ends up making every game feel very much the same since you're trying to achieve the same thing each and every time. Sure, you might start as a science focused leader/civ, but it's trivial to max that out, so you're still going to end up doing some culture, eco and military.

Endgame seems broken or unbalanced. Culture is by far the quickest way to reach victory, once you know what you're doing. I think I did it in just over 100 turns played in modern, on deity level. It seems broken because the AI spams explorers and swarms them around the map. It seems that researching a continent opens up sites for all players, which also seems broken, I feel it should only be for the person who does the research, but that would probably make it quicker / easier to win. You can obviously pick one of the other paths, but I found doing that a little frustrating when you see how much longer they take, and in some cases downright tedious.

Obviously everyone knows the golden rule of waiting for patches or expansions before buying but I'm wondering how much of this is so fundamental that it can't be easily changed. At the very least I hope they can implement a hall of fame / scoring system so you can actually judge how well you're playing game to game. And for the achievement whores like me, something more interesting then win as X in the modern age. That wasn't even enough to qualify as a half arsed approach imo
 
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Pharazon2

Trakanon Raider
734
1,319
Obviously everyone knows the golden rule of waiting for patches or expansions before buying

You seem to know it but did not follow it. Everybody that fails to follow it not only is getting a shit product in the short term, but in the long term is encouraging them to keep delivering the same shit experience with each new iteration.
 
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Goonsquad Officer
6,719
15,541
i keep seeing game studios try to make civ-like games. humankind. millennium, old world etc. but i think the big companies just don't have the talent to make a civ IV again.
 
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Kharzette

Watcher of Overs
5,586
4,565
Civ 4 is 6 bucks for the complete edition. I'd buy it but I don't really want months of my life to vanish right now.
 

General Antony

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
1,272
5,156
Game is cucked

It's too over-defined, too on-rails. It's like they hate the emergent gameplay and want to dictate to players how to play the game (where have we seen that before?)
 

General Antony

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
1,272
5,156
With some UI and map generation mods it's not awful. The AI is obscenely bad, if they can make it better evaluate city location (they provide decent recommendations to the player so it's like they're choosing for the AI to settle a bunch of shit land) and constructing buildings it should be pretty good in a few years.

Movement on unlocked large+ maps is too slow in Exploration for the distant land based victory conditions. Hopefully a map condition based naval speed modifier can be added.
 
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Serwol

Vyemm Raider
461
1,007
The AI has this habit of wanting to place their cities right next to mine, they could have vast swaths of land to expand but they just want to cozy on up to my capital then get mad at me for sharing a border.
 

General Antony

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
1,272
5,156
The AI has this habit of wanting to place their cities right next to mine, they could have vast swaths of land to expand but they just want to cozy on up to my capital then get mad at me for sharing a border.

I don't think the AI does this on purpose, i think it's just retarded. I played on a huge map with too much land and the AI basically left me alone, and settled some of the worst cities possible with no restrictions on themselves.

Generally next to your cities will be pretty bad locations (since your city is in the better spots) and it ends up aiming for these for some reason.
 

rhinohelix

Dental Dammer
<Gold Donor>
3,257
5,393
So I finally finished my first full game, and I was still having a number of just weird interactions with the game.
- Weird unexplained and unknowable loss of Influence (not the espionage running cost but it seems to be related to conquering cities; for some reason it just dropped and was accounted for on the Ledger as "Other costs".
- My Fleet commanders/army commanders unit portraits never updated; while the icon on the map would change, unit portrait would always be Exploration Age.
- Units take weird/bad oaths to close locations. I don't know when this started but it was in overdrive at the end of modern when I had a large army.
- Just some overall weird unexplained activity, when sometimes I would try to buy units but no failure message.
-No real explanation about the end of Modern age; do you get legacy points for your next game or is there just vestigial code talking about this? It wasn't clear at all how the end game works. I may just have missed it but it felt like the game didn't end regularly at 100% Even if so Why??? Does it wait for a victory condition before ending or can you Age out even if there are no more Ages? Obviously they are intended to add an Age but this is such sloppy game design. Everything about this seems there was always intended to be a 4th Age and they cut it in the rush to get the game out the door.
- Lots of fit and finish /polish (not Polish) issues remain with this one. Maybe by patch 3 or 4 it might be not be such a mish mash of good and garbage.

And Fall from Heaven 2 mod is free... doooo iiiiiiit ;p
I was on Quarter to 3 Forums when that was released with the guy who created it. I can't remember his name but a seriously top notch guy, and a super great mod.
 
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sleevedraw

Revolver Ocelot
<Bronze Donator>
2,118
6,016
They have rolled out several patches but who in the right mind played this game and said "This is great! Release it!"? Their QA must be overflowing with known bugs still, so much stuff doesn't work/is explained well/isn't present. How could you launch with no Great Britain? I think that the core of the gameplay of what I have seen so far is good but its A) Super different; even if it is good, its going to be a hard change for many folks to swallow. You are basically breaking the game down into three sections, three soft resets to prevent the steamroller effect, to give people a change to catch up, I think? But how effective is that going to be in practice? Regardless, I don't mind the change, and gives everyone bonuses/names that are applicable to the age.

Still so many miles to go with this.

It's OK, they will be adding GB as DLC.

With Ada Lovelace as a leader. Slay, kween.

Nerd Sniffing GIF
 
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General Antony

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
1,272
5,156
Played my first game on immortal and Charlemagne/China built almost every wonder in the game - his capital had almost no tiles that weren't wonders and 2 other cities with some wonders in them. No idea what allowed him alone to scale like that but his culture/science was really good for most of the game - rest of them were pretty terrible.
 

yerm

Golden Baronet of the Realm
6,727
17,244
I think the ai generates some kind of plan and then just yolos for it. If you for example just haul ass away turn 1, nobody seems to touch your amazing starting spot. If you rush settlers and take spots the ai wanted (this can be tricky since they want dogshit spots sometimes) they will just kinda shut down and not really expand. They also seem to base picks with HEAVY weights on weird factors, like tubman wants plantation goods and catherine wants tundra, while maya want trees and egypt wants rivers... but you can get kinda wonky stuff like catherine of egypt doesnt have anywhere to go because there arent tundra rivers. Himoko seems the worst for this in my experience but I dont know whats stalling her, she just doesn't settle half my games.

The city state shit seems pretty cool in some ways. The raids give up and flee if you show teeth which I think is a kind of cool thing, so unless you're right up on them you dont need to fully commit to extermination. I like the bonuses. The influence process blows though. Imo getting these is a huge advantage, especially since their combat ai seems better than the rival player ai.

The crisis system is cool. I wish you could pick or control though. Like, plague is dumb while barbarians are fucking awesome. If they steal just a bit more from millennium for these they'll be fantastic.

Map generation is terrible. I wish they had the guy who did this on stellaris, where I WANT maps that force all features in and wont skimp. Here in civ, they seem to REQUIRE having river systems and other bullshit, which means ugly ass shapes if you dont play continents, and archipelago in particular is these khmer dream half floodplains blocks surrounded by riverless islands. Shit really needs help.

Games got huge potential, and will be pretty fun in spite of issues once just the map gen is cleaner and an auto skip all dialogue mod comes out.