This game was kind of enjoyable when I was starting out, but there are glaring issues that become apparent as you progress. I have a lot to say about this game, but I'll start with the name. The name "CivIdle" might trick you into thinking it will play like a cross between an idle incremental game and a Sid Meier strategy game, but it's not really close to either. The basic concept of the game involves placing buildings and wonders on hexes, waiting for them to produce materials, progressing down the research tree, managing Happiness, and then rebirthing once your progress stalls to get permanent Great People that will make future runs more effective. There is nothing like turn orders, combat, city-states, or anything else you might expect from the Civilization games. There is a player trading system, but that has major issues which I will cover later in the review. The game is "Idle" in the sense that you will be forced to idle with the game open for 48 hours if you want to upgrade your account and remove the awful trade cap, ostensibly to stop botting. When progress slows down and you don't have enough progress to earn many Great People, you'll want to close the game and come back later so you can get "Warp", which is basically extra fast-forward time that you can use when you come back (like in Revolution Idle, but only up to 16x speed at a time). The max amount of time you can store is unfortunately low, and you have to spend some of this time every run to increase the cap.
There's not much strategy in this game aside from optimizing building placement for a few wonders, and for those wonders, you're usually just building the same things around them repeatedly. The lack of strategy becomes more clear around what I would call "midgame". Once you get out of the early game hell and get more Happiness from Great People, the main loop of CivIdle feels even more monotonous. Now your focus is on beelining to the end of the research tree as soon as possible so that you can spam the Information Age buildings and level up your wonders for more permanent Great People. You manually place down each building from the first seven ages, spam Research Laboratories, spam Computer Labs, spam Clone Labs, spam endgame buildings, wait in 16x Warp, then rebirth and do it all over again. The forced building spam when starting a new run is what absolutely kills the core loop for me, as there is no way to have the game automate this for you. No presets or shortcuts are available for building automation specifically, and it holds your progression hostage until you sit there and do the busywork. Imagine prestiging in Cookie Clicker or any other similar idler, but you don't have a "Buy all" button for upgrades and buildings.
The balance is rather poor at the time of writing this review. There are two wonders that let you pick a religion and government type. 99% of the time, you will just choose Islam and Socialism as they vomit out Science and will get you to the endgame buildings faster. As for the actual playable civilizations themselves, the Japanese are almost always recommended due to giving you lots of Science. You can't choose most civilizations, including Japanese, until you either pay up or wait for the free weekly Civ to cycle over. This leads into the endgame, where the focus is on building a French wonder that remains on the map and can give an increasingly-stronger buff after each rebirth, but only if you play and grind out a different Civ each time. The endgame loop basically turns into cycling through each Civ quickly to get this building maxed out, then swapping back and forth between two good Civs to farm Empire Value and game the trade system. Speaking of trades...
The biggest pox upon this game is the player trade system. Once you realize that there are no prestige layers and the standard game loop starts feeling as repetitive as a desk job, you'll probably want to look at the player trading system. The trade map is a map of the real world, and you claim land tiles to get bonuses for your buildings, which can be handy if you are starting the game. Every time a trade is made through the Caravanserai, the game generates a path between the two players to calculate tariffs from each player in the path and a penalty based on how many water tiles are traversed. It's not a bad system by itself, but there are hordes of alt accounts that set their rates to max and mainly clog up South American coastlines and several other spots, making trades to/from a good portion of the map worthless. They never trade and only exist to take value away from people that want to trade. There's not even a way to do private player trades with their mains and there's no leaderboard, so I still don't know the purpose of this. Most alts happen to use randomly-generated names with a PRC flag, so this gives the moderators of the game an easy way to shut down valid criticism as "phobia". The alt owners also buy the DLC for each account just so they can claim even more tiles on the trade map, so that's probably the real reason why Fishpond refuses to change anything.
The English chatroom ingame consists of mainly two things: discussions about the game and political posts that are worthy of Reddit Gold. Mods will allow the occasional [i] Two Minutes Hate [/i] against certain people or countries that they personally dislike, but will warn or mute anyone that argues back. One of these mods (I will not say who, but you probably already know if you've ever lurked in chat) has written several paragraphs under one of the recent negative Steam reviews for this game, basically trying to debunk a single point repeatedly while also saying "uhhh Fishpond says that there's no rule against paying for alts and making trading feel terrible, so why don't you do all that yourself:)". I recommend you sort by Most Helpful and look for that review if you want to learn more about the game, or if you don't believe that a mod would actually say that. Interested visitors to this game's Steam page are likely to see a mod bickering constantly with players and deferring every contention to the apathetic lead dev before even starting the game. This is radioactive behavior and would be addressed by any serious indie team.
I know this game could be better with a few improvements, but it's never happening at this rate. If CivIdle ever adds building templates for easier reruns or a more unique prestige system that changes core gameplay, I'd be more positive about it and update the review. As it stands right now, it's way too involved to be a traditional idler, way too stripped down and basic to be anything like the Civilization games, and just too flawed to recommend.
