Civilization 7 pairs seismic changes with a lovably familiar formula

The opening to Firaxis' big Civilization 7 presentation is wonderfully on-brand: a quickfire history lesson from Ed Beach, lead designer, on the many historical layers of the City of London. Beach is one of the rare cases of a lead designer on Civilization staying in charge across multiple entries, having overseen Civ 6 before Civ 7, and who's worked on the series since long before that. A physicist turned game designer – Beach also worked on the launch of the Hubble telescope, a key part of the Civ 6 scientific victory – he's also a self-confessed history nerd. As quickly evidenced.

Stood in front of a room of eager press waiting to hear the first bit of real information about a new entry to the series, Beach instead opts to pull up a map of London, under Roman rule, sourced from Encyclopaedia Britannica. Pointing to the ancient town's strategic position on the river, he wonders aloud about how the Ludgate, in the settlement's western wall, might have acquired its name. "We're not sure what it's named for. We think it might be called Ludgate because there was a Welsh king who lived out that direction called King Lud."

Then, it's a progression into mediaeval times, with Beach pointing out a river previously outside the Ludgate and how it's now changed to be within the city boundary. "They've actually taken the Fleet River and sort of diverted it, to make a cool little moat around their mediaeval prison…" Then, a slide showing the factories and railway lines rapidly developed during the 19th century, the river-moat now fully built over, as Victorian Britain clamoured for more usable land. "It's not even visible anymore, because they needed to respect what was going on with the Industrial Revolution."

Why doesn’t Sid Meier still make Sid Meier’s Civilization? - Here's A Thing

There is a reason for this, beyond the enjoyable flashbacks to primary school history lessons and making my own, tea-stained paper 'Roman maps' for homework. After finishing development on Civ 6 and undertaking a regular post-mortem, the developers at Firaxis found themselves stuck on a major dilemma, Beach explained. "We were very, very self-critical in looking at Civ 6, no matter how well Civ 6 sold or what people in the community thought," he told me in an interview later on. "I was shocked at how self-critical the design team was about ripping things apart that they didn't really like."

The big problem they identified? Games stretched out for an eternity, without any real moments for players to take a natural break before coming back. It meant, Beach said, a significant amount of players becoming too exhausted by marathon games to ever finish them. To find an answer, Beach turned to history, and recalled a common idiom: "history is built in layers".

The solution is the introduction of a new, and no doubt debate-starting system called Ages in Civilization 7, which Beach told me was both the biggest feature, and the one that "required the most work", as it represents "a foundational structural change" in how the game functions. Games, now referred to as campaigns, are broken up into three distinct stages: the antiquity age, exploration age, and modern age. Each age will come with what was only loosely described as "unique content and gameplay", with the goal of highlighting what made each period interesting. "It's sort of like going from trying to tell one really, really long story with a final conclusion, and now it's more like The Lord of the Rings, where we get three conclusions but they are all still together," Beach said.

It's a major change for Civ, which has knock-on effects for two systems of Civ 6: all civilizations will now move into the next age at the same time, as they did with the system of golden ages and dark ages in Civ 6's Rise and Fall expansion, but scientific and cultural progress along the game's two returning technology trees is now tied to that simultaneous age progression, and thus also a little reworked. Those two trees are now broken up. In a given age, you'll be able to progress a certain distance until you hit a wall, where you can continue to research 'future tech' for a bonus until all civilizations advance together. Progress through the age itself is shown with a percentage gauge in the top left – and as you get towards the end of each era, a crisis emerges.

Frustratingly, exactly how those crises might manifest wasn't clear (despite my best attempts to blitz through a roughly three-hour play session to reach the end of the era, it was just out of reach). Firaxis did offer some explanation of how these age-to-age transitions would work, however. Each civilization has four legacy paths – another new feature, tied to ages – which are split into science, economic, culture, and military. Completing milestones for each, like unlocking certain technologies or earning enough of a certain resource, will give you bonuses that you can carry into the next age.

Is there a risk that change might impact the sense of freedom you have, as a Civ player, to adapt on the fly? Has that been a concern for Firaxis? "It has," Beach said. "We've focus-tested this with a lot of people and we've gotten that exact comment."

The team's response has been to "loosen things up" to give you what Beach described as "opportunities to capitalise on – but nothing that forces your play in a very, very heavy-handed way." The goal, instead of funnelling you onto certain paths, has been to make each age feel like a "checkpoint" in the game. "The game state's gonna save off, and then come back in, and it'll have been reset a little bit in a soft way, but we don't want it to be such a heavy-handed thing that it channels players too strongly."

"I would argue it opens up so much more," added Andrew Frederiksen, Civilization 7's long-standing lead producer, pointing to the choice you get when you do hit the end of an age. "In Civs past, it was one marathon like we talked about, with no checkpoints, and it wasn't hard to find yourself in a situation where it was like, okay, the only opportunity to win available to me is either A or B."

The solution comes in the next big twist with Civ 7: for the first time, civilizations and their leaders are now untethered from one another. It's something Firaxis has been "toying with" for some time, Beach said, but the splitting of each game into ages proved to be the catalyst. When moving from one age to the next, you'll now be given a choice of civilization to take on. Hatshepsut, real-world Pharaoh of Egypt, was given as an example. In starting a game you'll be given a couple of recommended options for your chosen leader – Hatshepsut's being Egypt and the lesser-known Aksum, a strong trading power from the same region, along with any other option you might want to choose from. Progress to the next age and Songhai, another civilization, will be automatically unlocked just because you chose Egypt, while others might be unlocked because of something you did along the way – Mongolia, for instance, is unlocked as a civilization option by gaining access to three horse resources.

Without playing through a transition between ages myself, it's hard to know the true impact of these decisions. But one immediate concern here is what happens to the sense of role-playing that comes from picking a starting civilization and leader and acting out that role – of all-conquering Gengis Khan, say, or pious Philip II – until you ultimately succeed or fail. It's one factor that held back Amplitude's Humankind, the promising Civilization challenger that included a very similar feature, but ultimately faded away after its launch in 2021.

The flipside, Firaxis would contest, is that now you have the added freedom of switching as you go, while still keeping the option to continue as a civilization naturally progresses, which might naturally be the best fit with the added legacy paths and bonuses thrown in. As opposed to that "A or B" choice, as Frederiksen put it, "it's now more like: well I'm here, do I want to stay on that path, or do I want to take a new direction? Do I want to take the civilization that recognises [your playthrough] as more historical, or do I want to do something that recognises the achievements that I made in gameplay?"

How those leaders are chosen has evolved dramatically over the years, Beach told me. "It's way more complex and multi-layered now than it was in the beginning. In the beginning, if a designer just thought that a certain historical character was cool, they were probably making the game with it without any problem at all," he explained.

"Now, we have marketing data as to which territories are buying our game, and they want that to be a factor in it. We still have strict guidelines on gender diversity between our leaders and we never violate those. We purposely have hired two PhD historians, one with a specialty in Southeast Asian history and another one in sort of northern European history, so that they can balance each other out and give us good recommendations on things to include."

Frederiksen also referred to previous public talks the Firaxis team has given on choosing leaders and civs at events like PAX. "We'd have to totally update [our talk] now if we did it," he said. "It's not the same now as it was 10 years ago. Every time we do it, we do it differently the next time, just because we're always listening to fans – but also looking at the world and learning more about history."

I was curious about how the Firaxis team feels in making a game encompassing, effectively, all of human history – is there a sense of responsibility that comes with that? Is there a tension between literal, absolute accuracy and the gameplay itself? "It's a little bit easier for me personally than it used to be, because we didn't used to have two PhD historians as part of the team," Beach joked. They now contribute to the "narrative" elements of civilization too, the way leaders might interact and how events unfold over time, "but we're actually holding ourselves to much, much higher standards," he said.

As for the approach to accuracy, "I think the idea of making sure that we're 'considering' [historical meaning] but not 'stating' - this isn't 'better' or 'right' or 'good'; this is what is true," Frederiksen added. "And it's a piece," he said, like a part of the dozens of tabletop games dotted around the Firaxis studio. "Play with it, in these systems."

Other aspects of modern history, such as climate change, will also return again. "It's funny, when you put something in a Civ game, taking it out is a statement as well," Beach said. "So we're mindful of that. We're not going to forget about climate change – you won't see it in the first couple of ages that you play, it won't be relevant, but it's not going to be forgotten. There's always the question of: what are we saying by including it or not including it, and do we want to actually say that?"

There are more changes which might be conceptually a little smaller, but add up to a surprising amount of difference in practice. Cities have been changed once again, for instance. After being 'stacked' with Civ 5 and 'unstacked' into separate district developments on tiles outside the city centre in Civ 6, Civ 7 opts for a kind of hybrid, where buildings are placed according to your own choice and classed as either urban or rural districts. When cities grow, you now choose a tile to expand to, rather than it being automatically assigned as in Civ 6 (unless you bought it with gold). Builders are also gone from the game. Instead, you pick a location for your development and the city simply gets to work.

Another tweak to cities – which I felt could do with a little refinement, at least from these very early impressions – is the introduction of towns. All new settlements now begin as towns, and at first they have no production option. Instead of constructing districts or units, all of your town's production goes towards gold, until it reaches a certain threshold and can be converted to a city – or, to a specialised town like a trade hub or mining town. Again, it's extremely difficult to determine the real knock-on effects of this from such a brief time with the game, but the early issue is that founding new towns and managing them feels a little dull. My process was effectively just founding a new one with a settler, selecting a specialism and ignoring it (at least until I had to send some units there to defend against barbarian raids). Over time this may prove to be a boon, reducing the micro-management of 'wide' civilizations with numerous settlements. But in the immediate term, some of the satisfaction of min-maxing a new city up to speed was lost.

Speaking of barbarians, the way they work has also changed. Barbarian camps are now known as independent powers, which all have the potential now to grow into proper settlements or even city states of their own, depending in part on how you deal with them (city states themselves now won't start out on the map from the off, for example). They'll come with default levels of hostility, but you may be able to convert them to your cause – What if we could talk to the monsters?! – with the right management over time. One means of doing so involves spending influence, a new resource used for diplomacy – another system that's been reworked.

In these early stages, diplomacy was perhaps the most frustrating change I encountered, though the solution may be as simple as turning the dial on the frequency of certain interactions. Leaders you've encountered in the game will now regularly contact you with offers beyond trade and alliances, such as cultural exchanges, scientific endeavours, sanctions, and market fairs. The problem is, even in the setup I played with just three other civilizations, these offers were relentless, becoming a ceaseless game of pop-up whack-a-mole as I tried to get on with my business. You'll have three options to respond as a standard: rejecting them, which makes them dislike you a bit; accepting it, which typically benefits them a bit more than you (they get +6 food, you get +2, that sort of thing), or 'supporting' them, which grants you equal benefit but costs you a chunk of Influence.

You'll need Influence to do other worthwhile things – make offers of your own, win over those independent powers, and so on – and so quickly you're sucked into a cycle of micro-managing these offers every few turns, like an email newsletter where each edition comes with a compulsory quiz. In the end, I got so sick of my two closest neighbours constantly making me decide between three barely-impactful options that I decided to go to war with one just to make them shut up. Unsubscribe!

More promising was a slight rework of how combat operates. You now have special commander units operating like more readily-available Great Generals which, interestingly, are the only unit that gains experience from battle. They come with the ability to stack up your units onto a single tile and unpack them rapidly on arrival at a new destination, making constant line of sight essential lest you're taken by surprise. This also couples nicely with the ability to turn your scouts into lookouts that sit static on a tile with expanded sight range.

There's also a very visible change I expect will be very popular among longer-term fans: Civilization 7 has gone back to a much more realistic art style. Inspiration displayed by Firaxis ranged from historical miniatures and model railways (told you they're history nerds) to sweeping paintings of American Romanticism, including Albert Bierstadt's Rocky Mountain Landscape. The result is something rich and genuinely wonderful to look at, with a surprising amount of detail teased in the later-game stages in particular, that suggested much more intricate structures on each individual tile – all calling back to Beach's opening remarks on a city's layers stacking up over time.

Speaking of finer detail, some other nice little changes: you can now navigate along rivers, making for some enjoyable sieges of lakeside cities that might be a few tiles inland, previously out of reach from your armada; the old 'goodie huts' now offer you a little choice between two bonuses rather than a single random one (another nod to Humankind, interestingly); and trade resources are now assigned to towns rather than sitting at a 'deal table' waiting to be traded away, giving you another sub-system to fiddle with, and something towards a replacement for city min-maxing, as you can move, say, food-providing resources to towns that need to grow.

Despite all this – and in all honesty, a great deal more finer detail that can't be captured adequately from a single preview – maybe the most striking thing about my time with Civilization 7 is how familiar it still feels to play. That must, at least, be partly down to one of studio head Sid Meier's handful of golden development rules: that with each new entry, a third of a Civilization game should change completely, a third be only iterated on and improved, and a third stay the same.

Earlier on in our conversation, when talking about the Firaxis team's surprisingly self-critical take on Civ 6, Beach mentioned that rule himself. "We had an aggressive slate of things that we wanted to upgrade," he said, "but we have to stick to that 33 percent the same, 33 percent only modified rule of thumb." It sounded like it was as much a restriction as anything.

"I think the important thing is to not hold too tightly to the number," Beach said when I put that to him, before offering a good example of when that didn't quite go to plan. "There was one time, on Civ 7 development, where I tried to put together a spreadsheet to mathematically quantify whether we were going over our budget of 33 percent change or not," he said, slightly sheepishly.

"I never saw that!" interjected Frederiksen.

"This was before you were on the project…" Beach continued. "I don't think any of my designers bought into it. They're like, 'Yeah whatever, but I still want this change'. But it was still a useful tool for me to realise that we would probably need to back off in certain areas."

There are other rules, which often get overshadowed by the most well-known rule of thirds. 'Double it or cut it by half' is one of them. "We do that," Beach said. "The third one is never let the computer have more fun than the player."

"There are times where a designer gets so into all the 'history worked like this, and then this fed into this, and I'm gonna model all that and create a very cool simulation of it'. But if the player can't see that simulation running, then the computer – or maybe the designer – is having more fun than the player."

Ultimately, Civilization as a series has always been something of an old comfort to its players, a familiarly pleasing little brain tickle delivered by clicking Next Turn, that continues still here as much as it has before. And so, as surprising or concerning as any big new change may be, I've learned to trust Firaxis as a result. No doubt because of those now decades-old design rules – from a developer who's original office chair and still-operable 1991 PC sit on podiums at the heart of the studio – playing Civilization 7 feels, if not quite like donning an old pair of comfortable slippers, then at least a first try-on of a refreshed version from the same designers. A group of designers who know precisely what it was about the old pair that made them such well-worn favourites.

This preview is based on a press trip to Firaxis' studio in Baltimore. Firaxis/2K provided flights and accomodation.