Summary
If you’re anything like me, you’ve played thousands of hours ofCivilizationgames over the past two decades. There’s one thing about Civ’s gameplay loop that has never changed, not once: I love the beginning of the game, and dread the ending. This problem is particularly bad in Civ 6 because playing wide—having multiple cities covering the map—is the best and most efficient way to win on higher difficulties. But that means by the end of a playthrough, you’re faced with the ultimate tedium of moving troops, choosing production lines, popping builders, and changing districts, all without any of the sense of direction and discovery you get from the first 100 turns of the game. Even in games I’ve been winning, sometimes I just make the decision to start all over again to save myself from the drudgery.
This brings us to Civilization 7 and its understandably controversial ‘Age’ system. The game will be split into three separate ages: The Antiquity Age, the Exploration Age, and the Modern Age. Depending on the settings, these can each take up to two to three hours, splitting an eight-hour run into three shorter, more manageable chunks. Each Age has its own legacy paths, cards, unlocks, upgrades, and events, all building up to a crisis event mechanic that has only slightly been touched on in these early looks at Civ 7.
One of the main ideas behind this mechanic, as executive producer Dennis Shirk told me in an interview at Gamescom 2024, was to help bring some balance to the way the game plays out. “It’s even in our telemetry, when we look at how much players are actually playing, we see big drop-offs towards the endgame. This Age system is one of the newest additions to Civ 7—added just earlier this year—and we’re still working on it, but we hope that it can provide players with more meaningful decisions, chances to rebuild/restart, even later in the game, without having to start a new game.”
A lot of this will occur in the Exploration Age. Shirk told me “there’s no way we could do Pangea maps as default because we wanted players to discover the New World as a core mechanic. There will be a rush for players and AI to discover lots of new land in the mid-game, with new cultures, resources, and so on.” We didn’t get to see the Exploration Age, and it seems like the Age system is still being tweaked, but I’m intrigued by the idea of having more of that wonder and sense of discovery that you get as you first send your scout into the wilds.
Each Age will also end with a crisis, where worldwide stability is tested, and you’ll need to make some difficult decisions using Crisis Cards. These are basically policy cards from Civ 6 but they’ll offer your empire a lot of negatives that you’ll need to work around. Eventually, the world is thrown into crisis, and you need to rebuild and restart with your new culture and civilization as we talk about another new feature: the ability to change civilizations during the game.
This is another controversial feature, but I think it could work. Humankind tried it, and it was a neat idea, but with poor execution thanks to bad player signaling that a culture had ever changed, one minute you were fighting the Romans and the next it was the Mongols with really no thread of continuity at all. Civ 7 will at least retain leaders and some buildings and units will remain the same, hopefully spreading a detailed and unique aesthetic across your empire each time you play.
New civilization swapping also introduces a lot of new ways to play. Shirk told me that “it’s been really fun testing out new combinations of civs, and while we can’t talk about all of them, it’s been about finding a balance between those players who want to roleplay with historically-suggested civ changes and those who want to get really technical with it, and really push their civilizations to be the best version of itself.”
Civilization 7 feels like one of the biggest departures from typical Civ gameplay that we’ve ever had, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.Civilization 6remains one of the best games in the series with its absolutely heaving load of DLCs and leader packs, and you’re able to play that game forever. I can’t begrudge developers trying something new, otherwise we’d never get anything different. If these changes to Civ 7 mean I stay engaged through the entire playthrough, then they’ve nailed it for me.
Sid Meier’s Civilization VII
WHERE TO PLAY
Developed by Firaxis and published by 2K, Sid Meier’s Civilization 7 is a 4X grand strategy game all about building an empire that can rule the world. The project will be launching in 2025 on both PC and consoles.
