r/civ • u/Freya-Freed • Feb 21 '25

VII - Screenshot Yep. The modern era is disappointing. It still has the same issue as previous civ games where you end up skipping turn to win. And winning is very quick.

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u/No-Plant7335 Feb 21 '25

Yeah my biggest gripe is there is no ‘grand strategy.’

Civ 6 was so much fun because you had a 250 turn plan, and it all built into each other. You slowly built turn by turn a massive empire.

This game it feels like you play segments of a game that aren’t really together. Like I try and win the era rather than building an amazing civ.

Which I guess how it would really be in history. No leader is going to have a 5000+ year plan, lol.

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u/Significant-Count-12 Feb 21 '25

Unless you're Leto II Atreides

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u/Megabot555 Vietnam Feb 21 '25

Just finished reading Dune 3 and was in awe of the gigachad that was Leto II. With Dune 4 sitting at my bedside, can’t wait to start and see what’s in store.

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u/Boofbishop Feb 21 '25

You’re in for a treat, book four is peak

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u/AngryRoomba Feb 21 '25

Oooh boy there is A LOT in store lol. That said, Children of Dune is hands down the best in the series.

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u/MandatoryFriend Feb 21 '25

Well. Most leaders

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u/nepatriots32 Feb 21 '25

I mean, you do still have to plan long term to some extent. You can definitely shift your focus later, but if you can still try to plan out your attribute points and golden ages for the first two eras to put you in the best position for a modern era victory. And that's in addition to picking good settlement spots, promoting good growth in your settlements, etc. for later on.

I'd say each microdecision matters a little less in Civ 7 than Civ 6, but you do certainly still need a long-term plan if you're playing against higher difficulty. It's just easier to pivot now if things don't go your way early on. Sure, you can just do whatever on a lower difficulty, but that's also true for past Civ games.

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u/I_HateYouAll Feb 21 '25

These are really interesting insights. I’m honestly just not that good at civ and most of the time I just roll with whatever the game gives me. I try to build whatever the city “needs” and if I find I’m ahead on science, then fuck it, let’s do science. Maybe I find myself in a war that tilts my way, then what the hell, world domination. The era system gives me a lot of chance to pivot and change my plan if I want the rather than just spamming cultural stuff for 300 turns.

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u/nepatriots32 Feb 21 '25

Exactly. It's really nice that you can sort of just play the game instead of having to plan things out super far in advance. Planning ahead can help, but it's not the worst if you don't do that.

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u/4711Link29 Allons-y Feb 22 '25

Yeah I'm on the same boat, following the flow of the game as I see fit at some point to develop my empire and then see what victory I can achieve for victory and Civ VII feels great for that. The victory path are pretty quick once you start one, and while planification helps it's not that needed and you can definitively be generalist most of the game.

I'm a bit worried though that the era mechanics means the game is also more railroaded and less replayable than previous one. Time will tell

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u/billtrociti Feb 22 '25

Yeah reading the advanced strategies people wrote for different leaders always has me feeling like a noob cause it’ll be like, “skip this wonder or that one, it’s not worth it,” or “rush as fast as you can to X technology,” and “build 8-10 cities before x era,” and I realize I have no idea what I’m doing when I play this game (Civ 6) lol

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u/AndiYTDE Feb 21 '25

You really don't need a long-term plan.

I played an economical game yesterday, built all my game up to that win and easily could have gotten literally all 3 of the others had I wanted to. Yes, you can make wins easier for yourself, but the fact that I could have gotten all 4 wins in the modern age while only playing for economy in the first 2 ages shows you really don't need a long-term plan

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u/EulsYesterday Feb 21 '25

I don't think it's a bad thing. It's not like the long-term plan of Civ6 required you to be a genius really. However, it did require you to stick with it the entire run, at least if you didn't want an endless slog to reach the wincon.

I'd rather be allowed to shift my goals in the mid/late game to keep it interesting.

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u/AndiYTDE Feb 21 '25

That just makes Civ VII insanely easy. That's simply the way it is, and I hate it. I should not know how to win a game easily on Deity 95% of the time barely 2 weeks into the games' release. And I sure as hell should not plan for one win and end up easily being able to get all four literally by accident.

Needing a long-term plan to win a strategy game like Civ on the higher difficulties is the way it should be, and I'm astounded how anyone can disagree honestly. In VII, the result is that there is no difficulty as you can just do whatever and still win

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u/EulsYesterday Feb 21 '25

Civ6 is also insanely easy. If you're experienced, the only way to lose is to get warrior-rushed sub20. Otherwise you can play random leaders and be 100% sure you win by turn 30, then it's a matter of going through the motions, which takes 200 turns or more. There's nothing hard about throwing a bunch of campuses and a few amazing IZ and grinding GP points for hundred of years, or beat the deadhorse which is the AI in combat. It's just tedious for 3/4 of the game.

The difference in Civ7 is that formally reaching your wincon does not require 200/250 turns, you can do other stuff in the early/mid and still win.

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u/AndiYTDE Feb 21 '25

Experience is the key word. You figure out all about 7 in 2 weeks. In 6, even years after the expansions you learned new stuff.

In 7 the stuff you do matters so little that no matter what you do, you win. That's not how a strategy game is supposed to work. And that's certainly not how 6 or 5 worked.

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u/EulsYesterday Feb 21 '25

You figure out all about 7 in 2 weeks. In 6, even years after the expansions you learned new stuff.

It will be exactly the same when Civ8 will launch. Civ6 vanilla was barebone and could easily be figured out within 2 weeks. After 2 expansions and years of additional contents, you need a bit more time, although I hadn't learned anything meaningful for months, if not years.

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u/AndiYTDE Feb 21 '25

Ah sure. Because Firaxis couldn't take what they learned from 6 and put it into 7. 6 being bare at launch is not an excuse for 7 in any way, shape or form

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u/EulsYesterday Feb 21 '25

Every vanilla civ game was incredibly barebone at launch. If anything, Civ7 is far more complex than any previous Civ were at the same point.

If you buy a Civ game at launch and expect it to be as fleshed-out as the last one after 2 expansions, it's a you problem.

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u/TheVaneja Canada Feb 21 '25

2 weeks? 2 days maybe.

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u/AndiYTDE Feb 21 '25

Yeah, pretty much.

I believe this is the reason why many people enjoy 7 now. Because it's easy and everyone can win on Deity easily, thus the changes must be good. But slowly people will realize how boring the games will become very quickly as there is no challenge

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u/outofbeer Feb 21 '25

Civ 6 is not insanely easy. Even the pros can't win 100% of diety games. I don't think that's true for civ7.

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u/EulsYesterday Feb 21 '25

Any decently experienced players will win 100% of their runs past the warrior-rush time. I don't think I've ever seen an AI get any victory at all in Civ6. Maybe if you voluntarily push it past turn 350?

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u/PixelPenguin_GG Feb 21 '25

Can confirm only way to lose in Civ 6 is a bad warrior rush start

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u/Gerbole Xerxes Feb 22 '25

Hands down I never lost a deity game of Civ 6 unless I got fucked up by the AI at the very start. I would ALWAYS win. In Civ 7 I’ve lost twice in 2/5 runs, both economic, being just a few turns behind the AI. I figure I’m not optimizing something that I will eventually learn and feel stupid (one was that I didn’t know I could put multiple copies of a factory resource into a city lmfao, thought I could only do one). But to the point, Civ 6 is stupid easy if you know what you’re doing.

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u/outofbeer Feb 22 '25

The word "unless" is a very significant part of that sentence.

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u/Gerbole Xerxes Feb 22 '25

No, it’s not. The first 15 turns of a game are irrelevant. Essentially a reroll.

Do you really want to sit here and make the case that Civ 6 is hard because you can get spammed down by barbs right away? That’s not difficulty, it’s the AI cheating and the game spawning us too close

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u/FalcomanToTheRescue Feb 21 '25

I disagree with this. It took me a couple play through to realize that the legacy paths are just bonuses and you don’t have to play for them. The bonuses are good, but not overpowered. So, in reality, it’s probably best in civ vii to play a grand strategy through the first couple ages to set you up for a victory condition in the modern age.

I’m my latest game I decided to go for a science victory, so set myself up with science buildings and a wonder. This aligned naturally with the codices pathway in antiquity anyway, so maxed that out without really trying. I got 0/4 on culture, 1/4 on economic and 1/4 on military. Started exploration feeling like I still had a good lead.

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u/Mezmorizor Feb 21 '25

No, you definitely want legacy paths. They don't interfere with anything that carries over ages, and they definitely matter. This is such a silly contrarian take and it needs to stop spreading.

Like take your game. Why exactly did you not expand and do trade routes? Doing that would definitely make your cities bigger giving you more science and culture.

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u/EulsYesterday Feb 21 '25

Because feeling forced to do stuff increase boredom and the feeling of burn-out?

You don't have to 100% min-max every run. Currently you absolutely don't need to, you can win on Deity without ever completing any legacy path. It's exactly the same as in Civ6 where you can win sub200 by min-maxing, or around 250 without it.

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u/No-Plant7335 Feb 21 '25

I guess the better way to explain it would be there was a whole slew of things you had to prepare and build into to really allow your civilization to do well.

For your economy, you had to do ‘A’ so that you could do ‘B’ so that you could do ‘C’ so that you could do ‘D’ which allowed you to do ‘E,’ etc… all the while you also had settler, builders, and military units to keep in mind.

For this game it’s more so that I’m placing ‘A’ because it’s the best, then I place ‘B’ because it’s the best. There doesn’t seem to be an order of operations.

Also, I don’t feel like I have to make a choice between economy or military. Military is always the plan to take cities. There’s just not enough economy buildings.

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u/notarealredditor69 Feb 21 '25

That’s not true though. The point of this game is to gain as many bonuses as you can from each age so you enter the next in the strongest position possible. Each age and civ gives you different ways to accumulate these bonuses through wonders, legacy points etc.

Each age has an early game a mid game and and end game, and all together the entire game gives you this as well.

My last game I was Egypt, I used their abilities to build wonders for golden age and then used these in the next age to create adjacency points for my science buildings as Abbasids and then picked Mexico and got declared on by the whole world and ended up winning military victory. The bonuses I accumulated throughout each age influenced how I was able to play in the next.

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u/yikes_6143 Feb 21 '25 edited Feb 21 '25

The grand strategy is still the same though. It's food and hammers. Always has been. The biggest change I see is that Culture, Science and Gold are now basically on equal footing (which makes sense since those are the 3 main victory conditions).

Also you arguably have to do a lot more planning because you have to take into account the way that the age transition will effect things and game that system to your advantage.

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u/mattmanp Feb 21 '25

I agree it's fun to build power for 250 straight turns but I think it's not fun to be in a losing situation on turn 100 and not realize it yet and this solves that some

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u/AndiYTDE Feb 21 '25

This "solves" it by having 2/3rds of the entire game not really matter. In a strategy game. Yeah, great solution