To be blunt, Civilization 7, at least at launch, doesn’t always do the best job explaining some of its important mechanics. Perhaps the most confounding to ascertain is the concept of Legend Unlocks. Compounding confusion, these come in a couple of varieties, and they’re wholly separate from Mementos.
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An excellent art style, fantastic sound track, and great leaps forwards for replayability, Civilization 7 is a great game. But it will prove divisive.
The mission of this guide, then, is to help clarify these Legend concepts so that you know what you’re getting into as you level up the game’s array of leaders. It takes a fair bit of time with each, after all, to acquire their every reward. Best to know when it happens, and what exactly you’ve been rewarded with.
Legacy Attribute Nodes
Civilization 7’s terminology refers to each individual spot on the game’s Attribute Trees as “nodes”. This is probably where many readers will find themselves perplexed enough to look up a guide; on each Attribute Tree, there will be at least one node listed as a “Legend Unlock”.
Critically, clicking on them will not grant them. Even when you’ve reached a point in the tree in which you could otherwise have selected one, these nodes will not relent. You’ll just hear a ticking sound effect to indicate it’s a no-go.
Here’s the deal: if you check the progression menu, located at the top-right of the leader select screen, you will see a list of every leader and their level-based unlocks. Whereas the only immediately apparent form of unlock is Mementos – they’re right there on the main screen – everything else is nestled within this submenu.
The progress submenu is on the main, player-based, path by default, which is also worth sifting through. In addition to some purely cosmetic stuff, it’s also where you initially unlock Memento slots, and contains several Mementos all its own. Just click a leader below to see the things we’re talking about in this guide.
To make these “Legend Unlock” Attribute Tree nodes selectable in future games, simply consult the list of rewards for each leader. At set levels, they’ll gain fresh rewards, including any Legend Unlock nodes awaiting your acquisition.
In practice, this does mean you’re effectively receiving a slightly more limited iteration of a leader until they’ve reached the requisite levels. We don’t think you ought to worry much, however; every unlock, while valuable, is hardly game-changing in and of itself.
Legacy Cards
Legacy Cards are the other gameplay-related progression-based unlocks. If you’ve played enough of Civilization 7 to experience at least one age transition, you’ll know that from each age to the next, as your civ changes but your leader endures, you’re given a group of Legacy Cards to choose between.
For the uninitiated, the gist here is that you’ll gain more of them to choose from per type depending on how many Legacy Paths you elected to work toward in the prior age.
More powerful cards become available if you progress more on a particular path. You’ll also gain points to spend these on per your progression, so for example, let’s say you’re not at all a militaristic player. You might not get any Military Legacy Cards, but you’ll surely get more of something else.
With all that out of the way, Legacy Cards, also viewable in the progression submenu, are also unlocked at set levels for each leader. You’ll also see that the Legacy Cards you will unlock are also grouped into two categories: Exploration and Modern.
That’s because, as you might have guessed, the individual cards will either pop up as age transition cards from the Ancient Age two the Exploration Age, or the Exploration Age to the Modern Age. Simple enough stuff.
We hope this has helped you! Since this guide’s just a primer, as opposed to a full compendium, we’ll leave it at that. After all, you can check out every leader’s Legacy Unlocks at any time, either when selecting a leader or within a menu during gameplay, so no sense getting into the nitty-gritty here! Do take a look.
