Games
The seventh iteration of this beloved empire-building strategy game has removed the tedious jobs and dialled up the fun. By Katherine Cross.
Gameplay improvements ensure Civilization VII will stand the test of time
The moment that symbolises the promise and peril of Firaxis Games’ Civilization VII came midgame for me, when one of my island towns spawned a coveted Treasure Fleet, a ship laden with rare goods to be shipped back to my Civilization’s heartland.
It felt like a grand culmination: a triumph that marked a new era for my Ming people, led by the mythic Empress Himiko. Then I had to spawn the fleet again – 30 times, in fact – in order to achieve one of the basic economic milestones needed to advance to the Modern Era without entering a Dark Age.
It’s glorious, it’s silly, it’s occasionally very gamey indeed: welcome to Sid Meier’s Civilization VII, the latest instalment in the beloved strategy game in which you design and rule your own empire.
There is a gamified aspect of the title’s much-vaunted legacy system, in which you pursue certain objectives themed around culture or militarism or scientific research and give your Civilization powerful bonuses that carry over to the next age. Many of the objectives feel like basic quests in an RPG. You are tasked to collect two items. Then 10 ... okay. Now, collect 30! It’s unfortunate because it creates a grinding sense of tedium in a game that has otherwise banished many tedious elements of previous Civilization iterations.
Foremost: no more micromanaging of workers. No road or railroad building, nor waiting for trade routes to slowly build out a road network. No more monotonous placing of individual workers to repair the damage from a thousand-year flood. It all adds up to one towering quality-of-life improvement in the gameplay – smooth and seamless, rather than madly clicking about. The entire nature of city-building in Civilization VII is now better suited to the game’s Olympian perspective. You are, after all, the god-empress of your Civ: you have better things to do than control the placement of a single road repair crew.
Instead, as your cities and towns grow, you can automatically expand them with tile improvements such as farms and mines. Road networks spider out from your capital as you expand your empire. Finally, districts are much more flexible; gone are Civilization VI’s speciality districts that locked you into, say, only building a library in a Campus District. Instead, you create “urban districts” with slots for two buildings each, and you can mix and match as you like. The visual effect is striking: your capital will sprawl beautifully, even in antiquity looking like a proper metropolis.
There is much to like about this as it removes some of the frustration of city-building – one of the few blemishes on the otherwise beautifully polished Civilization VI. It’s safe to say that the refinements of existing Civilization systems are the strongest part of this game, while the more radical changes need further tweaking.
After all, each new Civilization entry has to justify its existence by both refining and changing core aspects of the game. Veteran Civ players will quickly acclimatise themselves to this game and find its affordances familiar. But there’s always one exciting new thing that compels us to relearn to play Civ all over again, and in VII it’s the legacy system.
Starting with 2010’s Civilization V, Firaxis began to change core assumptions in the series by “unstacking” units. You could no longer pile 20 tank units onto a single tile to create the much-loved, invincible “stack of doom”: one unit per tile, and that was that. It turned out to be a genius move, rebalancing the game around unit placement in a manner similar to board games. Then VI unstacked the city. You had to build speciality districts to house many vital buildings, rather than pile everything into a city of 20 million that somehow occupied only a single hex. Civilization VII goes further, unstacking the Civilization itself.
In past games, as you might expect, Civilizations and their leaders were inextricably linked. Catherine the Great always led Russia, Pachacuti always led the Inca, and so on. In VII, you choose a leader and then one of a few wildly different Civilizations.
Civ’s longstanding practice of historical madlibs reaches new heights here. For my first playthrough I chose the legendary ancient Japanese queen Himiko, but put her in charge of the Han Chinese Civilization. I could just as easily have chosen Egypt or the Khmer. As you advance through the Ancient Age you can unlock new Civs, and upon your evolution into the Exploration Age, you have to choose a new Civ to play – with the same leader.
The effect is interesting. There’s ample continuity: you keep your settlements, most of your units, and so on. But your diplomatic relations reset, as do the independent city-states that are sprinkled throughout the world. Old ones fade, new ones rise. It all serves to simulate the vaunted “test of time” that has characterised the arc of Civilization gameplay since its first entry in 1991. It also ensures each of the three ages feels like a self-contained game.
The trouble is with that legacy system, which feels like an underdeveloped fetch mechanic. The tasks are interestingly named and themed around each era, but their highly quantitative nature makes them seem pretty empty. Frustrating as certain tasks sometimes were in Civilization VI, there was a certain dynamism to, for example, building an observatory next to a mountain tile.
Realising VII’s full potential will require, among other things, significant changes to the user interface that would allow players to understand more easily the relationship between input and action – converting cities to your religion, for instance, is surprisingly opaque and it was difficult to use the in-game manual to answer basic questions. Also useful would be an expansion that refines and deepens the legacy system to make it more meaningful and less tedious. Luckily, given the history of the Civilization series, we can expect several additions: both V and VI were vastly improved by expansions that fully realised each title’s potential.
Indeed, to be fair to Firaxis, several of my complaints are already being addressed by their ambitious update schedule, and UI upgrades are a top priority for forthcoming patches and hotfixes.
To that end, given the vast scope of Civilization VII’s interesting new ideas, systems and visual glories, I believe this game will – in the portentous phrase that has defined the ambition of the entire series – stand the test of time.
Civilization VII is available for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC, Mac and Linux.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 8, 2025 as "Civilization endures".
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