Civ VII is a mediocre 4X game. It is also an absolutely terrible Civilization game.

It is worse than III (which was cack, but at least in a "Oh, no, bad luck, you've played the entire game on a bit of the map with no access to oil and rubber so now you're getting kerbstomped" way).

Civ VII is bad in a "This isn't Civ and it is also *incredibly* tedious kind of way. I deliberately didn't buy it when it came out because I don't play Civ to change my Civ a bunch of times - but then Test of Time mode came out, and it was on sale, so I tried it.

It is full of micromanagement (and, yeah, you *could* spend ages tweaking wheat:shield ratios in Civ II but you didn't *have* to. Here, you have to. You're constantly choosing how a city will expand, where to build this or that... and none of it matters because twice per game, the stupid game goes "Yeah, that city you built, all this stuff is obsolete, go overbuild it."

"Development of gunpowder renders all barracks obsolete, existing barracks sold for $250" I could live with; "Haha, new age! Everything resets your tech and culture advantage" is just... it's pointless. It guts the strategy.

And I can see exactly why they did it - it's to push this ongoing drift Civ has had ever since IV, to make each civilization a special unique snowflake with its own Building and Leader and Unit. Because then people will buy extra civs and leaders as DLC.

But what you will not end up doing is clicking "Just one more turn". Frankly, you will spend a long, long, long time clicking "Next Turn" and waiting for something to happen while the game *grinds* by.

It's not just that it's absurdly micromanagey, it's that it is simultaneously incredibly fiddly and also incredibly dull. The advisors are garbage and will pop up giving hints at complete random, with no regard to what you're doing, the diplomacy system has been ganked into a complete smorgasboard of nonsense that also includes espionage (but, like, abysmal espionage, *dull* espionage), and the religion system which IMO has no place in a Civ game and has never once worked right since they introduced it is now somehow worse than ever.

Oh, and to win a science victory you don't even go anywhere. You launch a satelite and then (you guessed it) click "next turn" a bunch. Big whoop. (I and II got that right, at least, letting you build smaller crafts with massive engines you could actually RACE the other civ if they launched first).

The goodie huts now give you cutsey little narrative events like you're playing the Sims, though, so I guess that's nice. And they look different. Like, not "they aren't a pixel brown hut with a yellow roof," I meant there's different *styles* of goodie hut. Some are tents, some are caves. This adds absolutely nothing, but someone has spent a lot of time making them pretty instead of adding depth: this is something of a theme here.

Don't. Just don't bother.

Even if you love Civ. Even if you still play I or II. Hell, even if you'd honest to god say VI was the best entry in the series - I've been playing this franchise since 1990 and I have never before felt so massively *bored* by what a Civ game does.

It isn't a Civ game in the sense that it hands you a settler and a world and a set of victory conditions and says "this world is yours - go nuts, see what your people can do". For me, that was the hallmark of a CIv game. It gave you *possibility*, and a sense of progress - you moved along the Tech tree, you got better, you upgraded units (or left obsolete ones on the map but in huge quantities, or because you were focused on a wonder - and wonders were rare and special. Seven per age, back in my day, because that's how many wonders of the world there were...).

But Civ VII has decided that model isn't any good and what you need to do is focus not on the grand development of your civilisation but nursemaiding every city, expanding glacially slowly, and playing not how you want, or to the strategy that seems best at the time, but playing how your civ is designed to be played.
It doesn't say "go nuts". Instead it never shuts up; it says "here's a world, here's your civilisation's special abilities, here's the age you're in, here are the objectives. Go. Do the objectives. No! Don't explore the world yet! You can only explore THIS bit of the world! You can't go to other contients yet it isn't the right time, how dare you! Also grow this city. Now say precisely where this building goes. And research this civic. And what benefit do you want from your We Love The ____ Day? And should the city dig a hole or catch a fish now? Do you want a farmers market with the civ next door? Don't forget to build a granary - do you want it here or there? Oh! Time for a new age! Scrap that, who do you want to be today? It's the Exploration Age now, go build a new city! Do you want it to did a hole or grow some wine? What benefit do you want from your We Love the ___ Day?"

It's not a Civ game. It's a machine designed to sell DLC to create "variety" in playstyles, and I genuinely think they made the core game deliberately boring because I can't see why else anyone would buy the DLC.

And the ages make no sense - there are three (just like there used to be in Civ I... but they're mandatory. Everyone is in them at once, and they're also HUGE so the modern era starts with a 74 gun ship of the line as your big naval unit and ends with a battleship instead of a SotL but they all sit in the same "era" because each era exists to give each DLC-friendly Unique Civilisation a Unique Era to be good in. The whole game screams "built around bolt-ons" and that sucks. Fantastic Worlds was an incredible expansion for Civ II but they didn't design Civ II to support the bonus disk. They built it to be fun.

Genuinely, even buying it on sale, gutted.

But on the plus side, I've got a copy of DOSbox and my old Civ II CD somewhere. There was a game that's stood the test of time.

I've played Civilization since CIV 2, have 7000 hours in CIV VI, and 700 in CIV VII. I've stuck it out - really tried every Civ and Leader, every playstyle.
This game's maps are weak, even with update 1.4.1. Every game seems the same - indistinguishable continents, nothing to differentiate one place to build over another or one civ over another - just a unending series of minigames, micromanagement, and change for change's sake. I find myself bored after 50 turns and in the rare case where the game keeps my interest - the age ends and the game essentially restarts.
This is NOT CIVILIZATION. This is a sad attempt to steal console players attention at the expense of their core audience and to try to "revitalize" CIV by throwing away everything that made it CIV. If you want to play something like this, Humankind did it first and better. If you want to play minigames, I hear Super Mario Party is pretty cool. If you want to play CIV, buy CIV VI at a discount. This game just lacks whatever carried this franchise for the last 30 years.
And the worst part is the constant money grabs. Most of the new game mechanics seem to exist only to drive DLC sales. "Let's release an unfinished, poorly thought out game for $70. Would you like to pay for more civilizations? What if one is a pirate?!?" I am incredibly sad that this is the direction Firaxis has gone - it would have been better, I think to just let the franchise die a slow death than to strangle it in front of our eyes. This game reminds me of Master of Orion 3, in that it was pretty to look at, boring to play, and nothing like either predecessor - effectively killing the franchise.

Tried it again after giving it months and months to have patches, and the gameplay is just sad.

Last game, did everything to boost my science every point I could, still only recieved the 7th in score because of the age system, because its based off 'codexs' and not actually what you've unlocked. And the age system feels so forced, that it breaks the game in a negative way.

Would not recommend. Play Civ 5, it was the best one.