Sid Meier's Civilization VII

Even with the update, still 6 > 7.

Meta progression? Absolutely horrible boxy, bland, brown UI? Confusing changes to gameplay, especially to city building - needing to drop gold on new settlements to turn them into cities else they can't use production? No British civs or leaders? I got as far as needing to assign resources to settlements for bonuses before giving up..

Imagine playing Civ V or VI and restarting every time you go into a new era. This game is just confusing and disorientating, and the UI is not helping.

Feel a bit scammed, was charged full price for an incomplete game... no modern military, oversimplified politics and game play. Should have just remastered Civ Vi.

The AI in this game is so bad, the game is not worth playing.

it is inferior to civ 6 in every aspect except the graphics

[h3]VII[/h3] [i]”My topic is the shift from 'architect' to 'gardener', where 'architect' stands for 'someone who carries a full picture of the work before it is made', to 'gardener' standing for 'someone who plants seeds and waits to see exactly what will come up’.”[/i] - Brian Eno, 2011 French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari reject the hierarchical nature of “arborescent” structures in favor of what they call “rhizomatic” structures, that of networks that can be connected to and from any point. Game designer and researcher Jesper Juul distinguishes “games of progression” from “games of emergence” in his essay “The Open and the Closed.” The original Civilization games had the courage to be games of emergence. Simple rules were created, and the consequences of those rules were allowed to run wild. They were cellular automata, complexity springing from simple conjecture. Thus, the games felt gigantic. The possibilities were manifold and endless. You could end up in a timeline where the Aztecs showed up off your coast with an aircraft carrier in the 17th century. Or, like the famous Civ II save game “Eternal War”, played thousands of turns over a decade, far past the typical end date, a world rendered a complete dystopia reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984, where three super nations contest a battleground where "ice caps melted 20 times.” The paths were vast and serpentine, each game truly the creation of a world, a universe, a timeline. Alas, Civilization VII feels small. Miniature. There is claustrophobia where there should be awe. The vast expanse of space and time both reduced to cramped room. This shrinking process was accidentally started by Civ V, where the (absolutely novel at the time) decision to switch to hexagons from squares and force units to spread out altered the scale of the map. Civ VI accelerated this, cramming a city-building game into a strategy game, giving value to land, making wonder-chasing a trap, and leaning into the cartoonish elements of the design (which, admittedly, on launch, I despised). But none of these approach the extent to which Civ VII diminishes itself. Turns take too long while the overall pace is compressed. The (too) many mechanics have almost no interaction with one another. Sure, the series and its conceptual underpinnings are under pressure, threatened by both the sophistication and (attempt at engagement with) pseudo-historical realism the Paradox school of grand strategy games contain, and the sheer Genesiacal inventiveness present in many indie colony simulators and roguelikes. Unfortunately, Civ VII attempts to compensate for the obvious anachronisms of large scale national-ish organizations existing when they could not, and persisting indefinitely across millennia, by garishly grafting artificial constraints onto the fabric of the game systems, without a thought for the notion that a world should feel like an ecosystem evolving by its own nascent accord. The emergent is destroyed in favor of the embedded. The lion is caged. The Ferrari is placed on a go-kart track. The “eras mechanic” is absurd, an arbitrary constraint that has no basis in human history. Eras, to the extent they exist at all, are not static deadlines, but results and symptoms caused by the collective actions of societies in staggeringly complex dynamic systems. Crises are not on rails, but emergent events. After vicious backlash, the updating of the game to allow game-spanning civilizations does nothing to remedy the flooded crumbling foundations upon which the structure is built. The world does not suddenly take intermission and awake to a new era. Literal billions of independent actors and cascading systems collide and forge a future. What’s particularly troubling about this is many of the game’s creators view themselves as sophisticated intellectuals resisting the consumerist philistine mob, when in fact they are agents of a publicly-traded, shareholder-return-maximizing behemoth, refusing to actually create generative systems whose processes might output their goals, pawns in their bosses’ publicly stated goal to cater to the lowest common denominator. If you want to make it harder for a single player to span 6000 years, then actually make it more difficult within the generative system. It’s always been entirely possible to change the basis on which Civ has been built, to move away from the Jared Diamond-esque geographic determinism and create a system for modeling human civilization built on Graeber/Wengrow (“rather than asking 'Why did inequality arise?', the most interesting question to pose about human history becomes ‘Why did we get stuck with it?’”) or Weber (“but fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage”) or Gibbon (“I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion”) or Spengler ("For every Culture has its own Civilization”) or Tainter (“in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return”) or Khaldun ("dynasties have a natural life span like individuals”) or Braudel (“Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness”). But no, instead, we abandon the courage of generative systems for repetitive drudgery of branching narrative. The eras mechanic, the crisis mechanic, the time constraints, all of these decisions are, at their heart, acts of defensiveness. We might call them “verisimilitude theater,” “performative realism,” “ostensive realism,” or “corrective artifice.” If there is such a thing as an “overcorrection fallacy,” this is a showcase for it. Fixes that each trade one unrealism for another, much worse one. This is all especially depressing because certain specific elements of the game might be heart-wrenching instances of brilliance in another context. The craftsmanship and beauty present in some of the terrain tile design, almost Hudson River School-esque in their romantic evocation of landscape, would be an astonishing achievement if only the rules of the world around them were competent. These are hurt even more by the interface design existing as an abomination of disastrous proportions, a set of aesthetic crimes against taste and function that would force the average RISD professor to suffer a catastrophic mental break. Civ VI, of course, was a mess on launch, and an utter disappointment to many of the longterm players of the series, only to later find itself and undergo a reappraisal with many (myself included, though this reappraisal happened only after a complete inability to reckon with VII). Perhaps VII will follow a similar path, though if it does, I suspect it will be the players and modders who get it there, who play an emergent game unto itself, a sort of metacommentary on how you might fashion functioning civilization onto an unjust and uncaring world. What might it mean to fix a game that fails in its attempt at navigating the feeling of belonging to a living environment? French philosopher Jean Baudrillard might have said it best when describing his notion of the “hyperreal”, in reference to the map in Jorge Luis Borges's story "On Exactitude in Science" — [i]“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.”[/i]

I think this game is meant to close the franchise. the devs decided to drop a cheap, crappy game to rake in the $$ and call it quits. that is the only thing i can come up with of why this is a less than half measure of all the previous games. i bought it, i will play it. but this hurts my soul.