Having seen Firaxis’ efforts over these first six months, I’m convinced that Civ 7 will indeed eventually ‘get there’

Image credit: Eurogamer

It’s fair to say that upon its initial release, Sid Meier’s Civilization 7 rather split opinion. I don’t think anybody would argue that it was the best-ever Civ game out of the gate. Nobody sane would, anyway. But for a breadth of opinion you only need look at my review on VG247 when compared to the verdict here on Eurogamer. On release, those two opinions were two stars and worlds apart. One considered the game to have a fundamental problem, being too boring. The other considered the base release a creaky but firm-enough foundation for a new generation of Civ.

Being frank, I can’t remember a main-line Civ initial release that was a slam dunk. I work on the assumption that they are always a bit ropey to begin with because of the sheer breadth and depth these games offer. The mission of an initial Civ drop is to provide new hooks that can be iterated on over years. The result has typically been one of the best games of all time… eventually. Six months and change on, Civilization 7 has already begun to transform significantly, thanks to a diligent and dogged cycle of patches and updates from the development team at Firaxis.

This last fortnight has seen the game welcome its most significant update yet. Titled ‘Tides of Power’, it is as the name suggests all about the oceans. Everything to do with the sea in Civ 7 has been reconsidered - from combat on the high seas to the status of coastal settlements. Even the terrain of the randomly generated maps has been adjusted with the addition of new types of resources dotted along the coast and new terrain to link the land to the sea, while new buildings and units have been added to encourage players to explore the ocean more.

There’s a bunch of other changes unrelated to water, of course. The balance of everything has been reconsidered. AI has been tweaked and fixed. There’s improvements to the UI and user flow both on keyboard and mouse and controller. The list goes on; in truth, it’s part of a rolling and pretty Herculean-feeling update cadence from Firaxis aiming to address user concerns and complaints.

That’ll Teach ’em. | Image credit: Firaxis Games

It is slowly but surely working. Civ 7 famously launched to ’Mostly Negative’ user reviews on Steam. Over six months, Firaxis has crawled on its belly over broken glass to get the game up to ‘Mixed’. Firaxis is doing what it can with free updates - and even this Tides of Power update, which is technically paid DLC, has been made temporarily ‘free now, keep forever’ until the New Year - so even if you don’t plan to play now, you should nab it now, while it’s free.

Anyway. That’s all the context. I’m mainly here to write that I’m really rather enjoying a new play-through of Civilization 7 thanks to the new naval mechanics and a new leader - pirate king Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard. Here he is in all his glory, his beard fizzling with lit fuses. As a pirate, Teach aligns most with the Economic and Militaristic branches of Civ 7’s gameplay - which itself is a quirk to me, as these are the two ways I’m typically least likely to play.

Teach’s prime ability is that his naval units can enter the lands of other civilizations and even attack them without having to make a formal declaration of war. This means you can harass other civs through piracy and plunder, and here’s my favourite bit: when you defeat another naval unit, you actually capture it rather than destroy it. It’s thereby a very simple matter to balloon your navy with Teach - but the gold maintenance cost of all naval units for him is also higher than for any other civ, offering a touch of balance in the form of the threat of bankruptcy. This is basically an evolution of what was already in the game with the Pirate Civilization, but it is quite a satisfying one.

I loved Teach in the Age of Exploration in particular, combining his natural abilities with those of the actual Pirate Civilization. That Civ can’t train Settlers, so has to rely on capturing them from other Civs. Or, later in the era, by using the Buccaneer unit to found new towns - but only from the sea, which means any new town founded from that point on will have to be directly on the coastline. That in turn plays synergistically with his focus on naval units - and you can see how that would all satisfyingly roll up.

Parley? | Image credit: Firaxis Games

Combined with the other naval update changes, all of this just makes Teach damn good fun, and quite unique. It’s in these sorts of leaders that Civ 7 shines, I think. Yes, the lack of Gandhi feels like a betrayal and a travesty still - but the concept that Civ 7 goes instead with less common and less overwhelmingly famous representatives who can fuel unique and esoteric gameplay mechanics is clearly conceptually rich. If you’re looking for a British leader, in many ways Ada Lovelace and Edward Teach are more interesting than a monarch.

All of these changes point to a general shift in Civ 7, where there has clearly been a hard push to improve the mid-game Age of Exploration. It’s clear that the developers wish to provide incentive to make that in-game era more closely resemble the new world rush for land and resources we saw in the real world, which in turn fuels difficult diplomatic decisions and military conflict.

I have to say, I’m really enjoying it. In these moments I can see the real potential of Civilization 7, and I can also see where the game has space to grow into something special and unique from the entries that came before. At the same time, the deficiencies in this version of Civ, whose design was clearly primarily driven by a desire to have a ‘single version’ of the game that is identical across all platforms - from high power PCs to console to mobile - are laid more bare the better I get to know the game and its systems.

The separation of Civilization and Leader, in particular, remains a sticking point. There’s also the eras. Tweaks to the ‘transition’ from one era to the next have definitely improved that element of the game, but it’s still a little jarring how each era is basically a separate ‘game’ that you move in and out of - and events taking place across merely three eras where past games could have as many as nine still doesn’t feel ‘right’.

Basically, there is much still to be improved. There’s years of work here for the team at Firaxis - but as I say that, I realize and remember that isn’t really different from any other Civ game since 1996’s Civilization 2 - these have always been ‘living’ games - just now we have moved from an era of infrequent larger expansion packs to one of smaller but more frequent DLC updates. Having seen Firaxis’ efforts over these first six months, I’m convinced that Civ 7 will indeed eventually ‘get there’. And as my days of piracy have shown, there’s still plenty of fun to be had along the way.