Civilization 7 launch day is nearly upon us and the next chapter in the Firaxis 4X game is on its way to overhaul and reimagine the entire Civ formula. Combat is different. The new Ages system transforms the entire dynamic. Diplomacy has been greatly expanded and made more complex. With Manor Lords, Stellaris, and Age of Empires still competing for the PC strategy game crown, Civilization 7 has more to prove than any of its predecessors. Fortunately, a lot of the earliest issues have already been solved by the first Civ 7 update, which arrives alongside the beginning of the early-access period.
In my own Civilization 7 review, I explain how Firaxis has attempted to streamline the 4X game without compromising its depth and detail. Mostly, the developer is successful – if you’re preparing for this next chapter in PC’s most prestigious strategy series, I would also recommend checking out the best Civilizations for each Age and all the Civilization 7 leaders. Given all the big structural changes, it’s only natural that a few small, fussy little problems would slip through the net. Firaxis is already on the case.
In Civilization 7, when you enter a new Age, all your cities revert to towns, which means they send supplies to your capital and don’t have any production stats of their own. If you want to upgrade your towns, you need to spend Gold, but, in my own experience, the cost of these additions can sometimes feel too high or unbalanced. The first Civilization 7 update addresses this by making the price of town upgrades scale correlatively to the speed of your game. Ideally, this will mean that if you’re expanding rapidly, the cost will go up, whereas if you’re struggling, it will go down.
Another note on towns. During my own playthroughs, when being attacked by rival armies I’ve noticed that they tend to neglect the districts surrounding your city and just go straight for the center. It makes defeating them a bit too easy – you can just concentrate all your troops around one tile and repel the enemy when they come to you. Thanks to the new update, the opponent AI now targets available adjacent tiles before going for the core of your settlement.
In terms of diplomacy, I’ve been able to force some pretty generous peace deals in Civ 7 so far – my opponents have been very willing to hand over their settlements, even if I don’t have an especially strong military advantage. The new update means that rival leaders will now “accept and reject peace deals more appropriately.” Similarly, if you’re at war with one leader, you can no longer forge a ‘Helpful’ relationship with another leader via the diplomacy menu, adding another penalty to stirring up conflict.
The minimap has been updated so you can now see all the tiles that you control, not just the centers of each settlement. Going back to towns, it’s not been possible so far to see precisely which town is sending food supplies to which city – the new Civ 7 update fixes this. There are also various visual and audio improvements, and a useful little tweak that means texture upscaling is now configured automatically based on your hardware.
All told, this is a very promising first patch. Check out how to use Civilization 7 specialists and also all the revised Civilization 7 victories and win conditions, so you know precisely how to emerge on top.
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