I do appreciate the efforts of the developers to fix the issues with the game. I just finished another attempt at playing and again I became frustrated with the forced age transition. The age transition is is the major problem; Cities revert to towns wasting time and effort, forcing the change of civilizations and leaders disrupts the continuity you claim to have fixed, being unable to stop the relentless religious conversions, having to redistribute resources, and many other issues...

I am 69 years old and a long time player/lover of this game. I honestly believe the only way to salvage what to me is a major disappointment is to allow players to disable the "age" transition aspect of Civ 7. Like many others I am going back to the older versions until this is remedied, and I will no longer purchase any future versions of the Civ series.

I've played every Civ since the first one. This game has the chance be great - maybe in a few months with updates and mods, but right now, it's not great. It has some fatal flaws.

The game doesn't lack features - it is FULL of mechanics and depth - but the game is set up in such a way that prevents you from fully enjoying all these mechanics and depth.

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THE POSITIVES:
1) The city growth system is really smart and fun. I absolutely love how they removed workers and changed it into a system where you pick tiles to improve when your city grows. Same with specialists - they are very powerful and important additions to the city. I overall really like the quarters system.

2) Commanders are cool and very powerful. Units are no longer upgraded but their air, land, or fleet commanders are. This adds a very powerful unit that can "load" units into it for transport and also provides buffs. The commanders are very powerful and carry over through ages, so they add a new unit that is important to protect through the whole game. Fantastic.

3) Related to both combat and the growth mechanic is how cities are captured. Now, you have to capture not just the city center but also all urban quarters of the city to capture it. This is a really interesting idea because you can now imagine massive armies fighting through mega-cities. Imagine a city with quarters on both sides of a river. Your army capture the city on one side, but the river gives the defender a line of defense. Interesting dilemma that adds a lot of depth.

4) The town/city dynamic is SUCH A SMART IDEA - I can now build settlements without making them full cities if I want to just control certain resources, chokepoints, etc. And the towns can be used to support cities by specialization that spreads their food, science, production, etc to the full fledged cities. I am loving this mechanic because it lets you mix and match playing tall and wide. You can play tall in a few key cities and have your "wide" empire of towns support the cities.

5) Definitely has the "one more turn..." feel!!

6) The AI used air power!! The AI seems perfectly serviceable. Definitely not perfect but absolutely playable and a reasonable base to build on.

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THE NEGATIVES:
1) This is HUGE. Any Civ game that doesn't let me play an infinite number of turns isn't a Civ game. The game just ends at the end of the modern age. No one more turn option. This is a deal breaker for me. Whatever else, please fix this!

2) The ages system is clearly meant to make it so the human player can't just win by the renaissance or whatever. They want to perhaps handicap the human player to an extent so the whole game is engaging. And there's some merit to this. I am finding the late game enjoyable in a way because it's challenging. BUT - THIS IS HUGE - the system is so abrupt that you're not playing a whole Civ game. You're playing three separate mini-games that are connected by the cities you own. I simply can't believe FIraxis chose to do this, but for example - your military units CHANGE LOCATION when an age transitions. So if you're in a war, too bad - units move. You can't research techs from an age after the transition to the next or choose to finish a prior age wonder. This is a flaw that really affects the gameplay.

3) I agree that the UI is barebones. And there are small annoyances - for example, if the AI offers me a city, I can't look at the map to see where it is because if I close the negotiation screen, it counts as rejecting the offer. There is just an overall lack of information, and things feel like a blackbox.

4 The modern age ends with battleships and tanks. I am guessing they're adding more ages/units with future DLCs, but the game doesn't really run to the present. No helicopters, missile destroyers, etc

5) Overbuilding seems cool - but how do I know what I'm losing? It's not clear what the effects of removing prior age buildings is.

6) Pacing seems a bit off. I am going to play a game with extended age length to see if that helps.

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NEUTRAL - these are things where I am withholding judgement for now and these could be positives or negatives long-term:
1) Leader attributes, ideology, civics, religion - these mechanics feel... incomplete? I cannot articulate my issues here. There's depth here (the leader attributes have a lot of impact for example) but I'm having a hard time immersing myself in them. Religion is extremely barebones. I put this as neutral because it could just be me and it's likely these will be expanded in the future.

2) No great people? This feels very incomplete, and the mechanic it's replaced with is really unclear (I was playing China and this mechanic basically disappeared after ancient age??). Again, this could be a me problem.

3) Trade...this grants you powerful resources that give yields. I think I like this but ... there's no trade screen unless I have a merchant, so I can't see my trade overview? Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so, and it goes back to the UI not giving enough info. Also, no companies! You have factories, but they don't function like companies as far as I can tell but I'll need to play more with it. I hope companies come back.

4) There is now no more resource requirement to build certain units. For example, everyone can build tanks - but if you own oil, your tanks add attack points. I am unsure how I feel about this. I really like the strategic dilemma of needing to capture resources in Civ VI to build a modern army/buildings, so I do miss that part. I can see the arguments for and against, so I put this in neutral. Maybe the effects of owning the resource need to be more powerful/impactful? So owning oil would make your tanks much better, not just a little better, and owning rubber makes them even better.

5) The decoupling of the leader and civilization means I am playing a game where Confucius is currently leading the United States of America in the Modern Age. I go back and forth on this mechanic. I have no problem with the idea of a culture "evolving" from an ancient one to modern (i.e., Norman to French) - but the total decoupling of the leader from the Civ does take out some historical immersion. Overall I think this is a mechanic the community just needs to play more with to get a sense of. I am holding judgement right now. But it's not a dealbreaker from me, and I could imagine enjoying the game with this mechanic remaining the same.

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Overall, I bought the $140 ($130 plus $10 tax) Founders Edition because it's Civ and I always buy the full version of Civ - but this isn't quite the game I was hoping for. It has a lot of potential to grow, and the city growth mechanics (where workers are removed) and city/town dichotomy are fantastic changes that Firaxis should be applauded for. And the combat changes - the commanders and the idea of all city quarters needing to be captured - add so much depth.

And that's a theme of the game - it DOES have depth. This isn't a game without features - it has SO many features. The problem is you can't fully enjoy them because of the abrupt age transitions and the inability to play endlessly (no "just one more turn...").

I personally think the best solution to this problem would be to let the player decide when to move to the next age - for example, let's say I want to build a few more treasure fleets in the exploration age before moving to the modern. Why does the game force me into the modern age - why can't I stay in the exploration and leave at my pace?

Firaxis, you have a fantastic base of a game with so many features and so much depth! Now please let me play it at my pace without railroading me through the ages!

Buyer Beware - Locked out of game play by 2k's FairPlay System.

I purchased the £119.99 deluxe edition version of the game when it came out on Steam with full intent to play it fairly. No cheats, no mods, just the based game and the DLC content. However, i was and have been since launch, locked out of launching the game due to 2K's FairPlay enforcement system, which flagged my PC simply because i had unrelated modding tools installed (used for other games). I never modded Civ VII in any way or had plans to.

This restriction was not disclosed at the time of purchase, and 2K's support confirmed that unless i removed the modding software (even though it wasn't used in conjunction with Civ VII) they wouldn't let my play the game i legally purchased. 2K refused to escalate the issue and i was initially denied a refund due to an automated policy by Steam.

After weeks of persistence and failed launch attempts (the time was flagged as 'playtime'), i was eventually granted a steam wallet refund - only after explaining that i never have actually gotten to access the game.

This is more than a technical issue, this is an invasion of digital autonomy. I believe it is completely unacceptable for a game publisher to dictate what software you're allowed to keep on your personal PC, especially when it has nothing to do with the game in question.

If you have modding software or game tools on your PC for any reason, you may be blocked from launching Civ VII at all. Proceed with caution. This kind of behaviour from a publisher sets a dangerous precedent.

In its current state, i cannot in good conscious recommend this game to anyone who values digital autonomy and due to the extreme lack of support from 2K. Steam, on the other hand, gets a big tick from me for being helpful and easy to deal with.

Edit - For transparency, it was WeMod, Nexus Mods, and CurseForge.

I have been an avid Civ fan since Civ 4 was released and have to say I am very disappointed with the new Civ 7. It feels like there is so much missing compared to what we had in Civ 6 and previous Civs. Here are just a few of my issues with the new game:
1. Religion is kind of pointless in Civ 7. It only really exists in the exploration age, after that you can't do anything with it. Faith no longer exists either.
2. At the start of each new age, the game scatters all your units around even if they were organized under military commanders... I then have to spend countless turns putting them back where they were. And even then, we don't always get the same unit types going into the new age.
3. City states just disappear at the beginning of each age! Why not just keep the existing ones and add new ones with each age? What is the point of forming relationships if they just vanish..
4. You don't have to work for strategic resources, they just appear! and even then, they have no real value. I used to start wars just to get niter, oil, etc. and you needed those resources for specific units. Where is the strategy now?
5. Trading no longer exists becuase eveyone can just get anything they want with a trader. You can't trade money, relics, influence, etc.
6. There are no governors or heros. They made Civ 6 more fun!
7. Only certain civs can have great people but everyone can have a religion? Great people should belong to all civs!
8. Why do resources have to disappear and be replaced in new ages? Those resourecs would still exist in modern ages... Just add more! Evey Civ game before would reveal more resources with new techs and ages, not replace old ones.
9. The only trade for ending a war is cities. Why can't we request things like gold, gold per turn, influence, etc. as well?
10. When an age ends, everything you were working on from the previous age gets cut off. There have been times i was only a turn or two from completing a wonder and the age ended. Why not just let it carry over into the new one? Also, why does everyone get to transition into the next age at the same time? Each player should transition into the next age once they complete the future tech & civic of the current age or something like that.
11. There is no strategy behind building placement anymore. There are way too many buildings now to remember what all their adjacentry bonuses are so you just end up putting them wherever. There is no pre-planning, just "i guess i'll put this here".
12. There are no dams, no energy plants, no geothermal deposits, no giant death robots, no uranium or nuclear-items, no mountain ranges, no tunnels, no helicoptors (or several of other units), no other things that i haven't listed but are missing..
13. You can pin things on the map
14. When you click "continue game" on the home screen, it never continues on the turn you were on last but rather several turns prior. So instead of being able to do that, i have to load my last save to start where i actually left off...
15. THERE ARE NO SPIES! It is literally impossible to fend off other civ's spy attacks because you can only counter spy one at a time. You can also only steal one tech at a time or one civic at a time and 90% of that time it always fails! And everything requires influence! Why??
16. Why do cities convert back to towns at the beginning of each age??? That doesn't even happen in real life! If a city becomes a city, then it STAYS a CITY. This is so stupid.
17. Loyalty means NOTHING in this game. You can never gauge another civ's relationship with you. They just start hating you out of nowhere and there is nothing you can do about it even if you were in an alliance with them because influence is just so damn expensive.
18. Its so hard upgrading every unit inside of a commander. Make it one button! Otherwise you have to keep reselecting the commander, then the unit, then the upgrade. Too many clicks!
19. There is little to no customization in our map types like there was in previous civs... No huge maps, no climate control, no sea level control, like only 4 map types... Just loving the options here...
20. You can steal a settler anymore! They just die... Also, you can only take over an independent power if someone is the suzerian of it? Otherwise you just clear it like a barbarian encampment? I don't like that.
Anyways, i think i'll leave it at 20 for now, but i know there is probs a lot more i am forgetting about. This game was so damn expensive for the literal nothing that it has. Total ripoff....

Biggest disappointment of the year. The original Civilization had a simple and compelling elevator pitch: "Build an empire to stand the test of time." They knew that it was a great sales pitch, and put it on the front of the box, right under the title. Civilization VII doesn't let you build an empire that will stand the test of time. Your empire will fall, off camera and without drama or even player involvement, at predetermined intervals. It will be replaced by a new empire that will also fall, and then a third one that will survive for what little time you have left to play, if you still care or feel much attachment to it at that point.

Each of these age shuffles is accompanied by a rubber banding mechanic that brings all of the other civilizations up to an approximate level of technological parity, keeping the game competitive like a lazy AI script in a racing game. Civilization VII doesn't have to worry about what happens when a Spearman fights a Battleship because it literally does not allow such matchups to ever occur. It's a solution to a problem, I guess, but one that removes a lot of what made Civilization interesting in the first place. The age transition shakeups also deprecate most of the city improvements that you spent the previous age building, which is as punitive and unfun as it sounds. Each age comes with its own set of fixed goals and challenges, making the game's march of history feel like an on-rails amusement park ride through a fixed series of checkpoints, rather than the player-driven expanse of possibilities that previous Civilization games provided.

There is also the atrocious AI, the perplexingly terrible UI, and a host of other problems, but the core failing of Civilization VII is not its rough edges so much as its lack of them. I admire the team's willingness to try new ideas in an attempt to address long-running problems with the series, but this game feels like they sanded away the rough edges so vigorously that they ended up with something that is no longer even recognizably a Civilization game.

The Civilization franchise is my favorite game franchise of all time, hands down. I am 41 years old and have played every single edition for hundreds or thousand of hours since I was just a kid. I was extremely excited for a new Civ game's release, I've been looking forward to it for months, but this is a bit of a letdown.

Let me say, I don't hate it. I appreciate the attempt at introducing some new features to make the game richer and to try and tackle the "snowballing" effect that leads to the endgame being way too easy.

The graphics are cool, but they are a little buggy and it is hard to know what is going on between your turns.

The UI isn't as bad as some say, but it isn't great and has some weird minor bugs in it.

The ages thing is choppy and anti-climatic. A crisis happens, you try to deal with it, it isn't meant to be solved, then suddenly the era ends and you are a different civilization with different units and all of your upgrades are lost. The year skips hundreds of years into the future and you're a new civilization. Each age feels like you started a new game, which could be a very cool way to handle the "snowballing" issue in 4X games, but as it stands now it just chops the game up.

The game is also severely shortened. I like playing huge maps with the speed on marathon. This feels more like a game for a phone than the expansive Civ games of the past. There is no time for a domination victory and you can't "take over the world" anymore due to the time constraints and a settlement limit. When the modern era ends, the game just ends and that is that. Winners are displayed, very little stats as there were in the past.

They've eliminated the workers and engineers, but the new mechanics are pretty cool.

I paid for the Founder's Edition, wanting to support the franchise and hoping for the most full-featured experience possible. Unfortunately, it feels like a simplified version of Civ made for a smart phone that is still in beta testing. It lacks the depth, the granular control, the epic centuries-long wars, and the feeling that you are building a grand empire.

It is fun to play, but it needs a lot of work. Firaxis can most definitely salvage the game with some major updates and make it into the best Civ game yet. My only fear is that in doing so, we are going to have to buy a series of expansions that add features the game should have had to begin with.

I may change my review later but at the moment, I cannot recommend the game for this price. I really hope that they turn this around and honestly regret buying the Founder's Edition. I suggest waiting and seeing how the updates go, they do have some planned, before dropping the cash on even the standard edition.

There's no way to describe my disappointment with this game without spending hours typing.

As someone who has played thousands upon thousands of hours of playtime, dating from the original Civ on DOS, I don't know how you can take a game that has been around for a third of a century, and ignore every good mechanic that has ever been developed, and sell it like it's a legitimate product. There's no diplomacy, there's no advanced technology, there's not even anything after WWII without the promise of 'we'll get around to it eventually...'

Now, addressing the horrible decision to make everyone align to an era based, start/restart eras mechanic, which is just a terrible excuse for not being able to program an AI that's smarter than somewhere between a rock and bacteria. We want to build an empire (to stand the test of time), we want a sandbox game to create what we want! Not the pigeon holing, do these tasks or else, unlock these attributes with extensive gameplay, unimaginative ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. ...And the final boss, modern era endgame goals to finish the game? ...just... Horrific.

The graphics are good, and armies are good, but that's the only thing this iteration has to offer. Making people wait a decade and then charging a premium for this product is shameful.

I'm legitimately sorry I bought the founders pack and spent way too much time thinking this would turn out well, only for the company to inevitably try to sell me something that should have been covered from the start.

I'm a CIV player since Civilization II (1996), and I feel so so bad I have to give Civ7 a thumbs down.

TL;DR: This doesn't even feel like a Civilization game anymore.

Here's a list of issues:

a. Era progression: I don't know if I should laugh or cry. You start with Benjamin Franklin with the Greek (!) culture, then you become the Spanish empire and only in the last era you play as America (if you choose to because that's only one of equally unrealistic combinations you are allowed to pick). In between eras you lose big part of your army, under some nonsensical rules, technologies magically appear and disappear, same happens with buildings. You lose this natural progression between eras you had in Civ6. And yes, going through major cultural changes, historically led to big shifts, but here you just get a feeling that you missed something and you magically landed in another dimension (sorry I meant "era"). And why only three eras? Are there really only 3 major historical eras? At the end of each era there is a "crisis" you need to manage (you can disable this though). It was added to level the field between eras, so no matter how well you played the previous era, in the next one your advantages are miniscule.

b. Legacy paths: As if the rest wasn't limiting enough, now during each era you "have" to choose a legacy path (culture, economic, military, science) with predetermined goals. If you don't reach any of the legacy goals you get super penalized.

c. Diplomacy: you'd expect that in the age of AI, you'd get more flexibility, realism and surprises. But guess what, you absolutely don't! There is a limited list of repetitive actions that you can perform, with hard to understand limitations. Trade deals? Forget about it, only through merchants. Really, how is it possible that you can't do trade deals on a country level, when historically this has been one of the most important tools in international diplomacy? "Well, maybe spying is better". Yeah forget about it. Spying used to be one of the most enjoyable aspects of Civ6, you can easily forget it exists now. Super repetitive, boring with almost no repercussions if you are revealed (although you get revealed most of the time). Spy units or spy agencies are not a thing anymore. Civ6 had the world council, which wasn't perfect, but offered a level realism (see United Nations). You'd expect that international councils would be better designed and would add another layer of diplomacy, but this is now gone as well.

d. Maps: Horribly small size even for the "big" size, and unrealistic layout. Yes you can now navigate rivers, and apparently more resources are being added with each update, but they are nothing like Civ6 maps.

I'm not reviewing to bash the game, so I won't continue even though there are more thing to address. I am just completely disappointed. As I said I started playing Civilization almost 30 years ago, and this is not it. It feels like something you'd expect 15-20 years ago—and maybe even at that time that would be a subpar result. I don't know who's gonna read this review, and I hope the game can be salvaged somehow. But if not, then please stop further development and start working on Civ8. What a shame.

My disappointment is immeasurable and my decade is ruined.

While originally this review topped 20K character count, Steam caps reviews to 8K. Many points were cut for brevity, especially comparisons to Humankind.

It's kind of heart-breaking actually. If there's a franchise I associate with quality it's Civilization.

The problems are not isolated to any individual part of the game and if I have identified them in such numbers and with such depth in as little as 50 hours in a grand strategy game, something is very wrong. Playing through the Antiquity era it was clear to me this game was not ready. The content was there but the game was embarrassingly unfinished. By the end of my first Antiquity era, I thought the game could be saved. By Modern, I was unsure. Now I know.

First, the good.

The music is sublime, it's of such quality as to engender pride in humanity. I found it more arresting than any OST I've heard this year, and maybe any of the previous Civ games on release. It has kept me sane through this game's tribulations as my companion.

Featuring a more traditional style graphically compared to Civ 6, your empire hums along in astonishing detail, particularly in the later eras. The fractal-like layouts of your urban tiles, with their structures unique to each of the game's pantheon of cultures is a sight to behold.

Army Commanders echo Civ 4 and provide deeper military strategy.

…and that's it I'm afraid.

I did not particularly like Humankind as a package, but many of its experiments were successful in isolation. Shockingly, almost everything Civ 7 poaches from Humankind emerges as a shallow imitation. I could not believe how unimaginative and simple the narrative events were. In Humankind, most of them tell a story of some kind, no matter how brief, and many are multi-part choice chains which lead to interesting consequences. In Civ 7 these choices are overwhelmingly bland, all but a select few lack the aforementioned chain of consequences entirely, instead most are a one time "do you want gold or happiness" or equivalent.

To make this worse, the yields they do offer are poorly balanced, sometimes in the extreme. This imbalance exists between the events as well, for some reason you can get successive, ostensibly identical, events i.e. do you want happiness or gold, but the amounts given will be drastically different (think nearly an order of magnitude). I would understand if I had done an elaborate event chain and at the end received a large reward for a good result, but these are both spontaneous, single instance events. I maintain that this is Humankind's best feature, and it's delivered so ineptly by the de facto custodians of the genre here.

While I think many decisions taken early in development doomed Civ 7 from the outset the UI will have come later, being iterated until it shipped. What we can infer from this is that Civ 7 was released staggeringly early. The UI is appalling. In your first run the game bombards you with pop-ups, yet useful information is inaccessible or often downright missing. Many critical mechanics are not taught or explained anywhere in the game and the Civlopedia isn't nearly informative enough. I also discovered some Civlopedia entries are visible only in certain ages, making planning needlessly difficult.

If screenshots could be included in a Steam review, this diatribe would be, overwhelming, images of UI with red circles around them and expletives drawn on top. I refuse to believe that this is purely incompetence. Poor UI elements in Civ is nothing new, but what we got here takes the cake and I believe this, more than anything else, is a sign that much more time was needed. UI can be made good, the game's systems probably can't.

An abbreviated list of problems which I did not have the character count to expand on:

- Unit variety is tiny. 1-2 units per type each era which then upgrade to higher tier version of themselves. No name or design change
- You can't liberate cities
- No tile swapping between cities
- War weariness is not affected by killing enemy units
- The game can end in the modern era at 100% age progress instead of waiting for a victory condition à la Humankind. Boring and unfulfilling. Like reaching a score victory 10 turns before the climax of the game
- Permanence of warehouse buildings. By the Modern age, antiquity warehouses have so few rural tiles left for them to give yields to. They take up space, which by Modern is at a premium, and do almost nothing for you. You should be able to replace them with the newer version if you want to
- Religion tied to one age then gone forever
- Age transitions trash any sense of unit organisation or long term border tension
- You can mix and match your leaders and civ but not how you play the game due to the rigid legacy paths, a reverse from previous games
- You cannot generate treasure fleets from inland cities, even if they are connected to your trade network by another coastal city (patched)
- Voiced age transitions try to give an overview of your last age, but only highlight which legacy path you followed most/first in a single sentence, they possess no intimacy. Similarly, ending sequences are flat with no sense of achievement or grandeur
- Factories' railroad requirement prevents construction in distant land cities
- All my Steam screenshots are corrupted psychedelic trips for this game only
- Repeatable projects must now be reselected every few turns
- Wonder animations downgraded from Civ 6
- Resources moving between ages ruins city planning. Once urbanised, a tile cannot be made rural even between ages so time you spent planning your cities' adjacency is frequently wasted, but you still have to do it because it might not be wasted
- The visual design of buildings is great however, it's all very static, no movement or animations unlike Civ 6

I was foolish to believe that Firaxis would be able to do what Amplitude could not. Foolish to think it were possible at all. The age and civ transitions have proved viciously divisive, but I will make myself clear: I believe these to be abject failures. I do not think the proponents of these mechanics have thought them through or played with them enough. Arrogant, yes, but I believe it.

The age structure undermines the promise of a Civ game: the satisfaction of building an empire from the dirt, reaching ever higher towards the stars. One empire to stand the test of time.

Civ switching strips immersion and removes one of the most interesting balance dynamics in Civ: timed bonuses. In previous games, some civs would be more powerful at different stages of the game, for example they may receive a unique building or unit at one part of the tech tree. For very powerful bonuses, this incentivised survival over greed until you reached your bonuses promoting dynamism and, consequently, replayability.

This kind of grand strategy created opportunities both for that civ and their opponents, who must decide how best to deal with a neighbour who may soon be a great threat. With civ switching, this is impossible as civs must be equally relevant in their age since they will be gone once it's over; a great recipe for a stale meta.

The transitions are abrupt, with poorly paced cut offs. The end of most ages are spent trying to delay era progress in an attempt to get more legacy path bonuses. Sandbagging is antithetical to civ and is not fun. Speaking of antitheticality, legacy paths are incompatible with the sandbox nature of civ. They are linear thiefs of diverse gameplay.

Even the announcer is only okay, her sterile delivery markedly worse than the, in my opinion, serviceable Sean Bean, and worlds away from the GOAT William Morgan Sheppard R.I.P.

Civilization 7 exists in a franchise old enough to be a part of the history it exists to tell. It may go down in that history as the first mainline game not to stand the test of time, and deservedly so.

In a friendly way, game is unfinished, the fact that you have to buy the 100 bucks version to get Great Britain is a travesty.