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Sid Meier’s Civilization VII

Oh? How interesting.

I wonder how it'll end up looking this time! To be honest, most of the fun I get from games like these is watching the built environments of humanity transform over time. The visual element is pretty important to me.

Maybe some new diversities in tilesets would be nice, too, like how Endless Legend does things.
 
My curiosity, as always, is mostly about what civilizations and leaders will make the cut and how they'll be characterized in gameplay. The most fun in the game comes from reading (about) the character select screen.
 
We'll see if this one has good base game. I remember that the early launch of Civ 6 base game got a lot of complaints. We'll see if they pull out a lot of changes this time around.
hghwolf said:
Game probably won't be any good, but that's just how it is with odd numbered Civs.
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Really? I actually still liked Civ5 more than Civ6. Granted, it was my first Civ, but it seemed... fine, to me (at least from a "final full DLC vs final full DLC" comparison).
 
One thing I hope that VII will arrest is the tendency to favour sprawl over tall and the ability to just not participate in systems that are annoying. I've been trying to get back into 6 and it's MOSTLY been fine but the entire game screams at me to sprawl like an AI and I just do not enjoy that, and more than once I've just quit a game because 'Time to vote in the World Congress ! It's the Medieval Age and you've met maybe three other Civs but now all eight of you get to be some sort of proto-UN with magic enforcement !' pops up or I'm sick and tired of playing whack a missionary.

Also maybe stop with the 'one military unit per tile thing', at least for long distance map movement. It's fine once you have corps and armies, but 'getting to the fight' should be a problem of logistics, not pathfinding.
 
hghwolf said:
One thing I hope that VII will arrest is the tendency to favour sprawl over tall and the ability to just not participate in systems that are annoying. I've been trying to get back into 6 and it's MOSTLY been fine but the entire game screams at me to sprawl like an AI and I just do not enjoy that, and more than once I've just quit a game because 'Time to vote in the World Congress ! It's the Medieval Age and you've met maybe three other Civs but now all eight of you get to be some sort of proto-UN with magic enforcement !' pops up or I'm sick and tired of playing whack a missionary.

Also maybe stop with the 'one military unit per tile thing', at least for long distance map movement. It's fine once you have corps and armies, but 'getting to the fight' should be a problem of logistics, not pathfinding.
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Every civ since the lost golden era of civ4 has been paying the cost of one unit per tile. Spreading the map around with wider cities and districts help a bit with giving the units the space they need but you still end up with a micro hell as soon as you get mass production of units going. I don't see this getting fixed.

This is going to be an incremental adaptation of civ6 the same way 6 is of 5, I feel.
 
Rgal said:
How dare you, Civ3 was great. It has many unique good things about it, like, uh. Being the first in the series I played.
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3 was the best because it came with a fat physical manual with historical notes on every unit and faction in the game. It was a hefty 2-disc installation back in 2001, and having something both useful and interesting to read while it installed was a godsend.

I also genuinely prefer doomstacks to blanketing the entire map in single units.
 
I like 6 a little more than 5, but not enough to play much of either. Both are fine as long as they're just an empire, and 6 makes it a little more engaging with district layout. But as soon as a war breaks out I just find them exhausting.

One unit per tile is so much tedious micro, and it's so, so hard for the AI to play it. It's a millstone around the series. I'm not going to say it's impossible for a new Civ game to beat 4 without reverting to stacks or coming up with some kind of midpoint, but it would certainly shock me.
 
MoogleEmpMog said:
I like 6 a little more than 5, but not enough to play much of either. Both are fine as long as they're just an empire, and 6 makes it a little more engaging with district layout. But as soon as a war breaks out I just find them exhausting.

One unit per tile is so much tedious micro, and it's so, so hard for the AI to play it. It's a millstone around the series. I'm not going to say it's impossible for a new Civ game to beat 4 without reverting to stacks or coming up with some kind of midpoint, but it would certainly shock me.
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It's not like they need to reinvent the wheel, either. Call to Power 2, a Civ-knockoff, did a stack limit of 12. You could group them or just have them pass through, but it was a good mid between Doomstacks and this One Unit nonsense. You could have Corps/Armies be how they work together with 12 (or whatever number you care for) being the limit of individual units acting independently.
 
eh, I feel like One Unit per tile is more interesting because then the unit type actually matters.
Even if you limit the number of units per stack, you're still going to wing up with blobs of generalists smashing into each other.
 
tankdrop24 said:
eh, I feel like One Unit per tile is more interesting because then the unit type actually matters.
Even if you limit the number of units per stack, you're still going to wing up with blobs of generalists smashing into each other.
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Yeah, I don't have great memories of III and IV when it comes to the military.

One thing I am hoping for VII is that aerial unit animations don't take so goddamn long. It's like a Final Fantasy summons with how much time they suck up, compared to the much more restrained attacks everyone else does.
 
Personally, I much prefer one unit per tile and ranged combat. I'm not sure how you could retain the latter without the former and still keep things interesting.
 
The Last One said:
Personally, I much prefer one unit per tile and ranged combat. I'm not sure how you could retain the latter without the former and still keep things interesting.
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Have you seriously never played C2C or one of the Erebus mods ?

Cause those have ranged combat. It's actually a pretty interesting consideration in stack combat because a significantly powerful barrage of projectiles(or spells in the case of Erebus) can whittle a stacks defenders down to where attacking isn't guaranteed suicide anymore. It'll never KILL anything (except some very specific forms of it) but taking off 40% of a units health can really swing combat in your favour.
 
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hghwolf said:
Have you seriously never played C2C or one of the Erebus mods ?

Cause those have ranged combat. It's actually a pretty interesting consideration in stack combat because a significantly powerful barrage of projectiles(or spells in the case of Erebus) can whittle a stacks defenders down to where attacking isn't guaranteed suicide anymore. It'll never KILL anything (except some very specific forms of it) but taking off 40% of a units health can really swing combat in your favour.
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Nope, I have not. So how does it work? Do you end up with doom stacks exchanging ranged fire then engaging in melee? Or one melee doom stack and one ranged doom stack per side?
 
WestOrEast said:
Yeah, I don't have great memories of III and IV when it comes to the military.
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It wasn't groundbreaking, but at least it also wasn't dragging down the whole experience by warping all of design around it and making war so painful you just never do it. War was about how much you could produce at what quality and swinging it at the enemy rather than endless micro. You lost to doomstacks not because they were an OP concept but because you got outproduced. Its main issue was that old civ AI wasn't that good (tech constraints mostly, we can do much better now) so it had to cheat and that showed in the size of its armies.
 
The Last One said:
Nope, I have not. So how does it work? Do you end up with doom stacks exchanging ranged fire then engaging in melee? Or one melee doom stack and one ranged doom stack per side?
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It depends. C2C gives combat bonuses for surrounding and ZoC effects as well, but (most) ranged units can't fire and move so there's (theoretically, by which I mean MP, the AI is not good at C2C) incentive to break doomstacks into several smaller but not trivially eliminatable groups with possibly artillery in the rear to fire at range 2 or more. There's also stealth and ambush mechanics in play so you could have a ranged stack sit concealed somewhere to fire on a stack as it passes or have them pretend to be barbs and harass enemy patrols.

It helps that C2C has automation modes for a lot of micro too; beyond exploring you can set units, or stacks of units, to automatically hunt anything they can attack, or patrol your cultural borders.

Erebus meanwhile mixes it up with magic, which has a variety of effects that can swing combat odds in a variety of ways; big summons do more damage but grant XP to the defenders, fireballs can't kill but deal collateral damage, buffs, debuffs, healing, temporary fort bonuses, all sorts of stuff. Greater unit variety and ability promos mix stack composition and erosion up as well since it's possible to manipulate which unit actually defends against an attack rather than always getting the worst matchup for the attacker.
 
Nyvis said:
It wasn't groundbreaking, but at least it also wasn't dragging down the whole experience by warping all of design around it and making war so painful you just never do it. War was about how much you could produce at what quality and swinging it at the enemy rather than endless micro. You lost to doomstacks not because they were an OP concept but because you got outproduced. Its main issue was that old civ AI wasn't that good (tech constraints mostly, we can do much better now) so it had to cheat and that showed in the size of its armies.
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eh, disagree. Production is neat, but I like that there's more to combat then 'one stack slamming into the other'.
 
tankdrop24 said:
eh, disagree. Production is neat, but I like that there's more to combat then 'one stack slamming into the other'.
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That's just fundamentally incompatible with how civ economies pump out units once they keep going. In another game maybe, or if you want to rethink the military economy very hard, maybe too.
 
I mean 6 does allow you to stack units into Armies and Armada's once you get to the industrial era and research/build the necessary pre-requisites.

It's not perfect, but it definitely helps reduce micro'ing in the late game when you can have nine units on three tiles.
 
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I mean EotD Civ6 combat... isn't really different from stacksmashing ? Whoever has the bigger numbers in place wins, it just takes longer. Way, way longer. Civ 6 wars make the 100 year war cry in shame about how it could never last that long. Sure, there's the occasional weird situation on the random maps that make positioning relevant for a few turns but it's rare that I feel tactical and smart in Civ 6 combat.

Which I guess is an improvement over vanilla 4, where I never feel smart, but it's not worth all the fucking micro.
 
hghwolf said:
It depends. C2C gives combat bonuses for surrounding and ZoC effects as well, but (most) ranged units can't fire and move so there's (theoretically, by which I mean MP, the AI is not good at C2C) incentive to break doomstacks into several smaller but not trivially eliminatable groups with possibly artillery in the rear to fire at range 2 or more. There's also stealth and ambush mechanics in play so you could have a ranged stack sit concealed somewhere to fire on a stack as it passes or have them pretend to be barbs and harass enemy patrols.

It helps that C2C has automation modes for a lot of micro too; beyond exploring you can set units, or stacks of units, to automatically hunt anything they can attack, or patrol your cultural borders.

Erebus meanwhile mixes it up with magic, which has a variety of effects that can swing combat odds in a variety of ways; big summons do more damage but grant XP to the defenders, fireballs can't kill but deal collateral damage, buffs, debuffs, healing, temporary fort bonuses, all sorts of stuff. Greater unit variety and ability promos mix stack composition and erosion up as well since it's possible to manipulate which unit actually defends against an attack rather than always getting the worst matchup for the attacker.
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Interesting. I like the idea of stealth and ambush mechanics and automation is always a good idea compared to Civ's tendency towards garrisons sitting in cities.
 
I think a system I'd like to see experimented with is no maximum stack limits, but a soft stack limit based on food and supplies. You can stack NX units on a tile, where N is the food value of the tile, and X is a possibly difficulty scalable multiplier. If you exceed the amount of forage you can get and run 'out of supplies' on a tile, the units start to starve and weaken. Marching your roman legion through a desert might allow you to bypass the enemy front lines-but out there, on the flanks of the Britons and their marvelous floodplains, you need roads and to hop from oasis to oasis to keep even a single unit alive. Or you might have pinned your hopes for a quick victory on marching through a narrow irrigated farm chokepoint, but the enemy pillages his own improvement to burn the farm and force you to either attack in smaller forces, or eat the attrition.

Late game, canned food, refrigeration, and railroads obviate the need for per-tile supplies, but instead you now need a road and rail link back to your industrial heartland.
 
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