The big problem with the age transition. It breaks continuity.

[WeirdWizardDave]

One of the biggest and most important defining features of Civ games for me, going right back to the first one, is the way the game tells one continuous story of civilisation from primitive tribes right up to the space age. Gradually progressing technology by technology, civic innovation by civic innovation through the entire span of human history.

The ages in Civ 7 break that continuity completely. One minute you're Civ is ancient Rome complete with legionaries, galleys and colosseums. The next its Medieval Normandy with swordsmen and Cogs. There is a break in your connection to your civ, like you're missing a chunk of time where the civilisation advanced and changed. Units are gone or moved, buildings are changed or made redundant, entire city states have simply disappeared. Its like you've missed the most important bit of the civs development. Instead of one continuous game that follows the entire sweep of history, we have 3 sub games rooted in a specific time which is separated from the others by hundreds of years of time. Yes its on the same map, we pick back up the story we had been playing, but after massive transformative events have reshaped everything literally off screen.

I didn't realise how jarringly it was going to be done or how much it would disconnect me from the game. Its a massive issue and one that is so fundamental I don't see how it could be fixed. Yet unless it is, this just isn't going to ever feel like a Civ game to me.

[Aluminum Elite Master]

How was it *not* going to be jarring, though?

That's one of the core problems I had with Civ 7 since it was announced, and it's a problem I had seen in HumanKind as well, years prior.

It was always going to be jarring... unless your civilization has a gradual progression into a successor state each time (say, from England to Great Britain, or from Rome to Byzantium), then it basically by default is going to be an abrupt switch. The switch would work if you went from Rome to Byzantium and gradually the uniques changed, losing colliseums for hippodromes at one point, then legionaries for cataphracts a little while later.

But that clearly wasn't what Civ 7 was doing. Instead, in the span of a single turn, Rome becomes Normandy.

The only thing I didn't realize until watching Advanced Access players react was that *city-states* were affected. That's a non-starter, and something the design team should have known better than to do. City-states disappearing at the Age progression point renders city-states kind of pointless unless you interact with them immediately at the start of an age.

And yeah, exactly like with HumanKind, civ-switching is a core mechanic that touches on many others... you can't really remove or fix it, because the moment you do, you have to fix everything else that also got affected by the change. HumanKind never could balance the gameplay or fix the immersion problem because, well, how do you remove civ switching without starting from square 1 again?

[Xevo Bolas]

No civilization has ever survived from the Ancient era and became a spacefaring civ. They're trying to model the natural course of history with the rise and fall of civs over time.

[Many-Named]

Originally posted by Xevo Bolas:

No civilization has ever survived from the Ancient era and became a spacefaring civ. They're trying to model the natural course of history with the rise and fall of civs over time.

No ingame civilisation replaced another. We could have had an organic evolution of civs as it really happened, but no, we had to go with a pokemon gotta catch em all mindset.

[Meridon]

Originally posted by Aluminum Elite Master:

How was it *not* going to be jarring, though?

That's one of the core problems I had with Civ 7 since it was announced, and it's a problem I had seen in HumanKind as well, years prior.
...

Indeed, I immediately had to think of HumanKind when this feature was announced and many others mentioned this as well.

How the devs of Civ 7 didn't see this or decided to include it anyway (despite it being a major drawback for HumanKind) is beyond me.

[Judicant]

Originally posted by Meridon:

Indeed, I immediately had to think of HumanKind when this feature was announced and many others mentioned this as well.

How the devs of Civ 7 didn't see this or decided to include it anyway (despite it being a major drawback for HumanKind) is beyond me.

I'm of the opinion that Humankind's problem wasn't the civ switching, it was more the bad experiences dealing with AI, online integration, *really* bad balancing, delayed modding support... and so on. Whether or not Civ 7 falls into this trap, idk, but Humankind's development had been dead until they revived it again lading up to the Civ 7 launch... Civ probably won't have such a lull.

[WeirdWizardDave]

Originally posted by Xevo Bolas:

No civilization has ever survived from the Ancient era and became a spacefaring civ. They're trying to model the natural course of history with the rise and fall of civs over time.

If that is what they were trying to do they've completely failed. Or at best, being super generous they've modelled it entirely off screen during a loading screen. Per my point, its a fundamental break from the core idea of the Civ games to break the continuity of the players interaction with their Civ, to skip forward hundreds of years through history off screen.

[Solvem Probler]

A feature that nobody asked for, was tried in other games and turned out to be bad and now it's here and won't go away.

[256shadesofgrey]

I agree. All my ranged units that were placed at strategic positions were removed and half of them got replaced by swordsmen near my cities. Now I'm forced to either waste resources on replacing them or play with a military that doesn't fit my strategy. Also why did my settler disappear??

And what's the point of upgrading a town to a city if it turns into a town again?

I'm struggling to find a reason to even bother with research. Just do the bare minimum to not end up in a dark age and then go all in on gold. That's going to help a lot more than research. As if buying everything wasn't OP enough in the previous installments already.

This age transition needs way more continuity. Maybe replace it with some catch-up mechanism for civs that haven't discovered all the tech and civics of a given era, but don't entirely invalidate our own progress. I always played civ for nation building, and this basically cuts the game short for me, because now I will always start in the modern era (or whichever is the latest nowadays) because nothing that I do prior to that even matters.

[WulfRock]

I liked the era switching until I realized that the city states just disappear, no ruins or anything just gone. Plus you can't absorb them. i attacked one and couldn't take it over. It had some prime real estate that I wanted. Plus moving units that I was prepping for an invasion. I don't mind the updating of units and what not, but dang. Also I think you just get the tech you didn't master. not 100% sure on that though. Overall I like the game a lot and will be playing often, just have to get used to the changes.

[Aluminum Elite Master]

Originally posted by Judicant:

Originally posted by Meridon:

Indeed, I immediately had to think of HumanKind when this feature was announced and many others mentioned this as well.

How the devs of Civ 7 didn't see this or decided to include it anyway (despite it being a major drawback for HumanKind) is beyond me.

I'm of the opinion that Humankind's problem wasn't the civ switching, it was more the bad experiences dealing with AI, online integration, *really* bad balancing, delayed modding support... and so on. Whether or not Civ 7 falls into this trap, idk, but Humankind's development had been dead until they revived it again lading up to the Civ 7 launch... Civ probably won't have such a lull.

At least for me, it was definitely the civ switching though.

In HumanKind, every civ switch compounds the buffs and uniques you get. You start stacking buffs and the game goes off the rails after just a couple of switches (and in HK, it was like 6 or 7 eras you could switch in). Pretty soon, the AI is incapable of handling anything at all, and you are off picking up every fame star.

And honestly, I expect Civ 7 to have a similar lull, though not as quickly as HK did. You really can't fix civ-switching... it's a core, central feature of the game that has a lot built onto it. And Civ 7 actually is worse, because cities, city-states, and even a couple of other things pretty much reset when that age-change happens, and that age-change is global. At least in HK, you left the era whenever your own score reached the threshold, not because of a global timer.

Civ 7 is borked. You can't change the civ-switching... it's even more hard-wired in Civ 7 than it was in HK, because it's global and affects the entire game, down to city-states. And that may very well be a fatal flaw for the game, here.

[Solvem Probler]

The system implies an arbitrary interchangeability between vastly different cultures. It goes against all common sense and manages to insult... pretty much everyone.

[Judicant]

Originally posted by Solvem Probler:

A feature that nobody asked for, was tried in other games and turned out to be bad and now it's here and won't go away.

I asked for it, it’s my fault.

[Solvem Probler]

Originally posted by Judicant:

Originally posted by Solvem Probler:

A feature that nobody asked for, was tried in other games and turned out to be bad and now it's here and won't go away.

I asked for it, it’s my fault.

We got him guys! Quick, get the pitchforks!

[Larkis]

Originally posted by 256shadesofgrey:

I agree. All my ranged units that were placed at strategic positions were removed and half of them got replaced by swordsmen near my cities. Now I'm forced to either waste resources on replacing them or play with a military that doesn't fit my strategy. Also why did my settler disappear??

And what's the point of upgrading a town to a city if it turns into a town again?

I'm struggling to find a reason to even bother with research. Just do the bare minimum to not end up in a dark age and then go all in on gold. That's going to help a lot more than research. As if buying everything wasn't OP enough in the previous installments already.

This age transition needs way more continuity. Maybe replace it with some catch-up mechanism for civs that haven't discovered all the tech and civics of a given era, but don't entirely invalidate our own progress. I always played civ for nation building, and this basically cuts the game short for me, because now I will always start in the modern era (or whichever is the latest nowadays) because nothing that I do prior to that even matters.

All points you earn in ancient/explorer age reduce the build time of the final wonder. Just doing the bare minimum would give you an huge disadvantage. At least on Paper. You also will have no wonders and there permanent bonuses, cause for building wonders you need research them first.

[parent child bowl]

Originally posted by Solvem Probler:

The system implies an arbitrary interchangeability between vastly different cultures. It goes against all common sense and manages to insult... pretty much everyone.

Previous titles did that to some degree too though. They just did it in a more subtle way.