Feedback to Dev Diaries

[Motgenror]

Playing Civ since Civ 1. This is what I strongly dislike about Civ 7, assuming I understood the dev diary correctly:

- Loss of identity between ages (your civ changes). Humankind (the game) sacrificed itself to test this idea out, there's no reason for Civ 7 to fall into the same pit.

- Loss of builders. Having a unit that improves tiles has been a core part of Civ's identity for the last 34 years. It's one of the most fun parts of the game. It feels very satisfying to get a unit onto a tile and improve it. That's what makes video games fun, when you stop thinking about math and spreadsheets.

- The UI in screenshots look significantly less Civ 6 and more like Humankind. Civ 6 has the perfect UI style, certainly the best of all 4x games and Humankind has one of the worst UIs I've ever seen. Style, I'm talking about style only. The screenshots have weird font to panel size proportions, too much sans and sans-serif mixing, unappealing color combos. I mean, I'm all for making improvements, but this is significant degradation.

- Commander reinforcements. Dev diary: "Shuffling replacement units to the frontline can take time and distract from the battle at hand" - yeah, that's kind of the point, isn't it? If you kill enemy units, you know it takes time for them to bring fresh ones. That's why you invest into better roads or fast transport units. How is this magical unit teleportation going to make the game more interesting?

- Not seeing two major shortcomings of Civ 6 addressed at all: diplomacy and warfare AIs. They're either horrible or nonsensical at making decisions ... so, is Civ 7 getting better decision making systems?

- Not seeing religion addressed at all, hopefully there's going to be a future diary post about it. In Civ 6, the best thing about religion is that you can install a mod that disables it altogether, freeing your map from the annoying religious unit spam. I think religion can be fun in so many aspects: interaction with science (religion vs science, as they're mutually exclusive), religious wars and so on. But please don't spam the map with those silly units.

[Motgenror]

> I thought Endless Legend had a classy UI with nice colour schemes, but I can't complain about Civ VII's user interface until I get my hands on the finished product.

If you don't like something it's better if you say it as soon as possible, because later will be too late. Might be getting your hands on a cold product by then. In the same sense as DA Veilguard is cold - it sold, but it was more like a well-attended funeral.

> As for the magical teleportation. No idea what you are talking about.

Commander reinforcement mechanic. Check the dev diary about combat.

> The closer that you got to the end of the game the more time was wasted moving units and barking orders.

I mean, managing cities, tiles and units *is* the game.

> That's one of the reasons why people wouldn't finish their games.

Someone at the studio made that up and you're repeating that as a fact. Don't you think it requires evidence that this is a major reason?

Here's a much more plausible hypothesis: at the end game it's pretty much obvious that you either won or lost, there is no time to change the outcome, so there is no reason to go on. And you don't get points for losing in a spectacular way, neither does it feel satisfying to win, since it's usually a snowball anyway. If they wanted to fix the endgame satisfaction problem, they've misidentified the cause.

[Henryk]

Reading the OP was so much fun. Thank you. I can't stop laughing. And why you don't continue playing Civ6 if it has the best UI and mechanics? Save your money, ignore changes and improvements and have fun with Civ6 now. I have to wait one month for Civ7, because I like good ideas and changes. And I'm sure they will provide additional free content only for Civ7 founders, right devs? ;-)

[keviinb]

Civkind has at it's core a shining , less strategic , smaller design.

It may well suit console and casual players thou it's disgusting cash grab may well back fire big time.

Lesson's hopefully will be learned and CIV 8 get's back to being a PC game

[Evilgenius]

Originally posted by keviinb:

Lesson's hopefully will be learned and CIV 8 get's back to being a PC game

Sadly this will most likely never happen again.

[plaguepenguin]

-- If your enjoyment of playing Civ games has depended in any way on immersion in one particular historical civ, sure, not being able to play as that civ from 4000 BCE to 2100 CE is going to remove that aspect of your gameplay. For me, the only immersion I seek in a strategy game is that the game constantly forces me to make trade-off choices among all the possible paths forward towards a victory condition. Civ-switching, by itself, would be at worst neutral for me as a feature of a strategy game, but, if you read the game guides and view the livestreams, it's clear that switching civs is only part of the wider mechanic of age transitions. These reset many aspects of a game back to even across all civs in the game, but that leveling just makes it more important to secure for your civ as much in the way of carryover perk features that the game now has. Of course the devs might not have succeeded in integrating all these transition features into a challenging whole, but if they did, transitions will create a whole new dimension of immersive strategic choices.

And, setting aside the role of civ switching in making this a better game, it seems to me that it shouldn't really mess with immersion in historical cultural identity. For example, if you want a less anachronistic and immersion-jarring experience playing as the US, what you do in 7 is play as Ben Franklin, choose Rome in Antiquity, then the Normans in Exploration, then America in the Modern. This seems to me more faithful to the historical identity of the US than having Ben Franklin lead a band of settlers to chop out Washington DC in 4000 BCE with their stone axes.

--Yes, builders are gone. Their role at improving tiles is taken over by a choice you make when you earn a new population point that lets you work a new tile of your choosing, in whatever buildings you then choose to produce on that tile. You still get choice in the process of increasing your city's yields, only now without the need for a unit to move around the map doing the building. Production goes straight to tile improvement rather than through a builder unit. You still have to make choices, but now don't have to micromanage moving a unit around.

-- I'm not going to make any judgments one way or the other about graphics and UI until I've played the game, because all I want from either is to make the game state more readily apparent. I have enough skull sweat to get through making decisions, and I don't want to have to spend cognitive steps interpreting what the map and other information means in game terms. The prettier, more detailed, graphics actually have me a bit concerned that they will make the game state harder to take in at a glance because of their clutter, but, you don't know until you've played the game, which I haven't. As for UI, I ended up relying on mods to improve that for 6. No big deal if I have to do the same for 7.

-- The reinforcement thing, as briefly discussed in the Antiquity livestream, doesn't teleport units instantly, it takes a few turns, presumably about as many as it would to move the units manually. This is just a quality-of-life thing, prompted by, not only avoiding the micromanagement of having to move the units manually, but also the pathing difficulties that all prior Civs have had for movement orders multiple turns into the future.

-- Diplomacy has been completely revamped. There doesn't seem to be a World Congress, and there clearly is no Diplomacy Victory. The new feature of "influence" now controls all aspects of your one-on-one relations with other civs and the independent powers. You have to spend influence to make any sort of deals, and there seem to be a wider array of deals to make with other powers. The need to spend a limited resource, influence, presumably limits the human players in doing what they now do freely in 6, cheat the living daylights out of AI civs. Humans will still get the better of their deals, presumably, it's just that now they have to budget their grifting.

The devs talk about improved AI, but I am skeptical that anyone could overcome the fundamental problem -- AI actors have to operate off a program, and these games are so complex that the programs couldn't possibly take into account all the game state conditions relevant to implementing a strategy that responds adaptively to the current game state. They mention in particular the streamlining they have implemented in this game as allowing the AI programs to embody better responses, and that certainly makes sense. Less clutter, less detail that you and I can dismiss without thought as irrelevant before we get down to making our choices, but that tend to choke a program with their sheer volume, and it makes sense to me that the AI certainly ought to be capable of at least some better responses. I'm hopeful about AI that is more competitive, but I'll believe it when I see.

In that connection, getting rid of builders and having military units move with and automatically reinforce commanders, are two examples of clutter reduction, designed partly to reduce what the AI has to take into account in formulating its responses, as well as quality-of-life for human players.

-- They talk about religion in the Exploration livestream, but, sure, it deserves, and hopefully will get, a Dev Diary. What has been revealed:

You get a pantheon belief in Antiquity. Religious buildings in Antiquity and Exploration at least, seem to give happiness and culture.

All civs get to found a religion, if they choose, in the Exploration Age. This gives them access to what looks like 3-5 beliefs, the number depending on your choices to devote resources or not to getting extra beliefs. Some of these beliefs give you benefits for having any settlement, your own or foreign, following your religion, so there is an incentive to convert any settlement. No civ's religious founding city can be converted to other religions. There are missionaries to send out to do this conversion, but there don't seem to be any other religious units. There is no theological combat between units. The missionaries just spend charges to convert cities

There is no religious victory. Converting foreign cities, besides benefits from your beliefs, helps you along the military legacy pathway, but only in the Exploration Age. That Age is said to be when religion is most important. It is possible that there are no Modern Age religious buildings, which would definitely make religion quite weak in the Modern, because buildings from prior ages lose their adjacency.

[SLG]

What do you mean by religion not addresses at all?

Have you checked out all the official videos?

[Motgenror]

Originally posted by Lee:

What do you mean by religion not addresses at all?

Have you checked out all the official videos?

No, but I read all the dev diaries. If videos cover more, I'll check that as well, thanks.

[Motgenror]

Originally posted by plaguepenguin:

...

> Of course the devs might not have succeeded in integrating all these transition features into a challenging whole, but if they did, transitions will create a whole new dimension of immersive strategic choices.

I'm familiar with the reasoning and whoever came up with these improvements are clearly smart people. But I'm afraid they're the wrong kind of smart. They will create systems that are great on paper, but will be emotionally rejected by the casuals like me. We'll see.

> it shouldn't really mess with immersion in historical cultural identity.

It's not about the historical immersion, obviously comrade Stalin 4000 BC to 2000 AD is comical. It's about keeping the same identity through the entire run. I know a great example. You know GTA 5 and Detroit Become Human? I absolutely could not play these games because they keep changing player characters midgame. I *hate* that. I'm associating myself with a single character and develop an emotional bond and boom - rug-pull. You're playing as someone else now. I just realized it's the same thing with civ-changing in Humankind and Civ 7, why I'm seriously opposed to that change.

> For example, if you want a less anachronistic and immersion-jarring experience playing as the US, what you do in 7 is play as Ben Franklin, choose Rome in Antiquity, then the Normans in Exploration, then America in the Modern. This seems to me more faithful to the historical identity

Sometimes trying to be more realistic hurts the game. Video game design is about taking shortcuts in the name of fun.

> You still have to make choices, but now don't have to micromanage moving a unit around.

Hopefully that still feels satisfying.

> doesn't teleport units instantly

Still teleports them though, right? What happens the path between the spawning city and the commander is blocked by enemy units?

> but also the pathing difficulties that all prior Civs have had for movement orders multiple turns into the future.
> [...]
> the programs couldn't possibly take into account all the game state conditions relevant to implementing a strategy that responds adaptively to the current game state.

I mean, if they cannot hire someone to solve the pathfinding, the more general decision-making is doomed.

There are decision-making approaches that adapt dynamically to the surrounding conditions: utility systems, GOAPs. There is a finite amount of information to act on, known general strategies, known win conditions. The AI doesn't need to make every move perfect (because humans don't), it just needs to be good enough compared to a human.

> Diplomacy has been completely revamped.

I wasn't referring to diplomacy mechanics, but rather to the AI decision making. In Civ 6 it's practically non-existent, as it all comes down to military force anyway. I want the AI enemies to treat diplomacy seriously and engage in it thoughtfully. Be more human, act like you've got something to lose, like you care.