The past 18 months have heralded a small renaissance for strategy games. Manor Lords takes the municipal organization of Cities Skylines and crosses it with Age of Empires’ feudalism. Frostpunk 2 explodes the bleak survivalism of the original into a high-level political drama. Ara History Untold is a more flexible alternative to 4X traditions. Millennia is playful, eccentric – an attempt at ventilating the genre’s stuffy historicism. All these games have particular qualities, but after several hours playing Civilization 7 it’s hard to imagine that Firaxis and its decades-old series will ever face a serious challenge. If you have to choose one strategy game (and given the amount of learning they demand, and the time that they consume, you probably do), Civ 7, right now, feels like the only real choice.
The central tenets of the series have been either expanded or upended in Civilization 7. Diplomacy, for example, is fueled by a new resource called Influence, which allows you to build treaties, forge covenants, and place embargoes on your rival leaders. Warfare, particularly in relation to how your units move, and how they behave during turn-based battles, has also been revised wholesale. You can pack your troops onto an officer, creating an army that you steer across the map as one. Rather than promoting individual units, you promote the leader, and their buffs automatically apply to any soldiers on nearby tiles.
Particularly given the new Ages system, whereby you advance to a different civilization every time you hit a major progression milestone, it’s easy to understand why Civ 7 might feel like an overcorrection of the classic 4X game – like Firaxis is breaking and remaking core systems in the name of empty solutionism. But the achievement of Civilization 7, at least on these initial impressions, is how despite its drastic new ideas it still feels legible and comprehensible.
The opening Antiquity Age is when the game is at its simplest, but even here Civilization 7 presents a network of systems and mechanics. You need to research technology. You have to choose what to build, and on which tiles. You’re prompted to choose a path to victory, or at least a national spirit for your current age, and out of that your advisors appear to give you assignments.
If you choose a militaristic path, for example, your army chief will task you with completing the Discipline civic, building four warrior units, and combining them into a force under a nominated Legatus. Rival civilizations emerge, presenting opportunities for mutual growth but also diplomatic disaster. Citizens’ celebrations prompt changes in social policy. Narrative events force you to make tough decisions, like where to relocate the people displaced by a recent flood. Do you build within your capital itself and centralize production there, or expand outwards and take advantage of resource tiles? Should you make a Wonder? Do you want open borders? Have you checked the resource panel? How much gold, food, and happiness are you producing?
You have to deal with all of this within the 20 turns – given the big changes to Civilization 7, even if you’re experienced with the series, it may seem overwhelming, like your decision-making and your ability to read the game are being crowded out by sheer mechanics. But this is where Civilization 7 (and more broadly speaking Firaxis, which performs a similar gameplay design sleight-of-hand trick with XCOM) reveals its brilliance.
Civ 7 is complex, and it’s deep, and there are countless ways that you can direct and permute each playthrough, but at the same time it’s highly readable, and it’s staggered and explained for you in such a way that even within the first hour of your first game, it feels natural. There are strategy games that are mechanically simpler than Civilization 7, but paradoxically harder to understand, engage with, and operate. For 34 years now, the makers of Civilization – first under MicroProse and then Firaxis – have perfected and aggrandized the game’s mechanics. But playing Civilization 7, the studio’s aesthetical flair is apparent, also.
The visuals are very rich. Cities are detailed. Terrain is lustrous and colorful. On the occasions that you interact with other leaders, a huge amount of characterization is condensed into even the most fractional animations – strike a deal with Augustus, and his haughty little nod does more to establish his persona than a five-minute cutscene or pages of dialogue.
But there is also a subtle, pedagogical purpose behind Civ 7’s design. It’s the short sound you hear when a project is completed, or the approving drum beat when you place a building or confirm a decision. There’s an effective color coding for every unit and menu screen. Information – be it written or visual – is presented not just clearly, but attractively, instructively, enticingly. Grand strategy games are menu games – interface games. Playing Civilization 7, it feels like Firaxis has perfected the art of information transference, and in this genre that’s as fundamental as customizable character classes or ‘gunfeel’.
The Civilization 7 release date is almost here and PCGamesN will of course have a complete review. For the moment however, having played it for several hours, it’s hard to imagine a strategy game that’s equally coherent and complete. The systemic changes may dissuade long-term series loyalists. The finer problems of balance and late-game pacing might only become apparent after launch. But taken in aggregate, it seems like Firaxis has successfully made a different, more in-depth, and evocative 4X game without compromising either Civilization’s identity or the game’s – and the studio’s – reputation for mechanical clarity.