Civilization 7 - It's shit
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
- Start date
I swear, it feels like Civ: Beyond Earth all over again, except instead of having 8 melting pots known as sponsors, now you get to decide the mixture yourself.
Which makes me question their decision even more; They knew something like this didn't work in the past, they are aware of what made civ games so great, so why change that?
I guess because they feel they needed to change things, otherwise there's no point making a new game - potentially with the idea that if it didn't work last time they'd try to make it work this time.
Honestly, I think the last Civ I played was 4. These days I just take one look at the horrendously over-complex graphics and my interest wanes: deep inside my strategy soul I'm a hex wargamer and I want utility in my graphics, not pretty and distracting fluff.
Personally all I really want is just a modern graphical port of Civ 5 or 4. Just a good solid Civ game with modern graphics and a nice readable UI.
iirc the design philosophy of civ sequel is something like 1/3 stay the same, 1/3 is improved, 1/3 is ditched.
Civ graphic are pretty clean, there's not much bloat to them, actually one of the often heard complain about 6 was the graphic being too cartoonish (ie simplified).
Its a bit strange to ditch civ at the point where they switched to hex format though.
I was kind of looking forward to this one, primarily because I'm bored of endless leader dlc in 6, but I guess I'll give it a pass for now at least. All I really wanted was some improvements to the scale of the game, a bit more variety in leadership and better balance. Y'know, figure out the issue with districts and remember that India and South America went through a lot more shit than like three leaders stuck in the same biome.
It probably would have been like civ 6.25 or 6.5 but I think that would have been way better than this even at full price.
It probably would have been like civ 6.25 or 6.5 but I think that would have been way better than this even at full price.
Funny, I was actually just thinking about the Civilization series the other week and wondering when they were going to release 7. Too bad, I was hoping they would show some ambition and release something new that did something cool with the 4X core. Oh well, it seems like every Civilization game gets a mediocre reception these days, guess the series is just trading on it's name these days. Was Civ 6 worth playing? I never did try that one.
At the risk of being tangential to the topic, what are everybody's favorite 4X games? I know Meim named some above, but didn't really sound too hot on any of them.
At the risk of being tangential to the topic, what are everybody's favorite 4X games? I know Meim named some above, but didn't really sound too hot on any of them.
Unfortunately some of the other songs are pretty bad. Annoyingly so.
There are few games that made me search the menu for music options to get rid of it, but civ 7 is one of them.
I told my older brother not to get this game and to stick with Civ6. He got it on sale for about $2.99 on Steam.
Haven't tried Ara
Old World is a fun little game, but not groundbreaking.
AoW4 is imho pretty great. Customization options, different playstyles, different factions, different worlds. The only slightly downside is that it doesn't have the storytelling of the older AoW titles.
I couldn't get warm with the 4X Spellforce at all. Not much variety, not much interesting decisions to make, not many surprises.
I also have humankind and vastly prefer that to Civ 7 as well.
Civ 6 is a solid game, it just suffers from some annoyingly samey gameplay at times, major balance issues, and you can't recreate nations pretty much at all which frustrates me. The extent to which you could succeed in recreating a nation varies a lot between options, but generally speaking the nature of how cities are built and the scale the game is at doesn't allow for it, which annoyed me a lot. For reference, each "city" (as in, the hex that settlers unpack themselves on) takes up one hex, and then each "district" (as in, fine arts, education, military, etc.) takes another hex. Japan gets a total of like 10 hex on their starting island, and you don't get a choice about whether or not you're having districts - they are the primary system by which you win the game, either by being the smartest, the artest, the religionest or so forth. So Japan basically gets fucked, so does England to some extent, Mali is laughing unless you have Canada and the US in a game in which case they may never find a good starting spot, and being a middle east leader is not great because you could easily be competing with like 6 other leaders in the same tiny zone because the game does not have an even distribution of nations per continent.
Balance is also a problem. They give a bunch of nations benefits that could only possibly help if they started in their historical beginning location, and even then probably not for long, while others have functionally map dominating abilities that help for the whole game. The best comparison is Canada vs England (Eleanor of Aquitaine edition), where Wilfred gets a bit of food per tundra tile (this is mildly insulting since over 90% of Canadian population is nowhere near the tundra, and more or less admits that the way the "real earth" map is drawn makes no sense) and Eleanor gets to apply -1 Loyalty per great work held in a city to cities of other nations, and if the enemy city goes to 0 loyalty instead of becoming a free city state, they just join England.
I get the England explanation requires a bit more of an understanding of game mechanics than I'm giving, but the simple version is that by collecting great works of writing or art, which are super easy to get, you can eat any country bordering England alive without ever declaring war. Their cities will just join you one by one, and only a few nations have inbuilt methods of resisting that. You probably can't win the game this way, but you can functionally destroy local competition for resources which gives you a huge advantage in the later game. So you have a country that survives by living in the frozen north and taking land nobody wants, and a country that convinces its neighbors to happily jump in its open mouth.
So yeah. Its a game that really scratches that 4X itch, but I wouldn't pay full price for it. Leading into your other question, my absolute favorite is Sins of a Solar Empire. Its way larger scale than Civ obviously, but its a fun straightforward "build empire, get smart, get good ships, get good guns, go for it". The original is a very old game, but I'm seeing they were considering a sequel way more recently so I may need to check that out.
That's pretty disappointing, but aren't there random map modes in Civ 6 too? That's what I always played in the other Civs. Is the game any better that way? Although you can't really get away from broken abilities like that. I'll definitely check out Sins of a Solar Empire the next time I get a hankering for a 4X game.
Yeah the game is really not balanced around earth map, so it wouldn't really make sense to balance civ around that. Some civ do have bonus that require certain features, but they have starting bias on random map toward those feature. Balance is a major issue though, some civ are ridiculously broken and other are near useless. When I play with friend, we've ban like a third of civ and need to play with a bunch of self imposed rule. But if your just going to do AI, it doesn't really matter.
imo civ 6 is the best of them all, by quite a bit (largely because it sorta got a third expansion). Warfare is meaty and full of small important decision (sadly the AI is pretty dumb, but thats a stable of the genra), economic/city planning strike a good balance between overly complex for the sake of it and so simple you just build the same thing every time. But it ultimately depend on what you're look for in a 4x. Diplomacy is still fairly simple, they tried to give ai personality, but it rarely work. And again, the ai just can't keep up with the player without massive economic advantage and mod to boost them up. But I'd say the top dog in 4x space is civ 6 or paradox stuff if you like those.
Sins of a solar empire is more of an RTS than 4x, its a good game, but if you go in expecting long game with lots of complex decision, you'll be disappointment. It's not micro intensive like most RTS though, but a game last maybe 5-10 hours and mostly involves sending wave of army. The ''sequel'' they just release is closer to a remaster really, almost nothing changed except everything is a bit faster, I'd just grab the first one on discount for like 5$.
Huh, you'd say Civ 6 is the best. Hmm, maybe I will have to try it some day. Has Paradox released more 4X games than Stellaris?