Civ 7's new updates convinced me the strategy game's future is bright

A couple of majorCivilization 7 updates this year have transformed the 4X game, mostly for the better, and reignited my hope for its future. Firaxis launched the hefty Test of Time update in late May with dramatic changes to how the game plays. At the end of June, it pushed a smaller update with tweaks to the happiness system and how governments work. It’s not quite reaching its full potential yet. Some elements, like diplomacy, still feel like shadows of what they’re meant to be. But for the first time in a long time, it looks like Firaxis has a strong vision forCiv 7 and a way to translate that into gameplay.

Civ 7‘s Test of Time update changed a lot, and one of the big differences is how your civilization changes through the ages, or not. At launch, Firaxis made you swap leaders and civs at the start of a new age, and new civs unlocked based on how you behaved in the previous age. It was an inventive way to meld the flow of history with your strategic choices, but it was also very unpopular — perhaps unsurprisingly. When you’ve spent decades letting people make Isabella of Castile besties with Gandhi, suddenly switching to a higher level of historical realism (and one that curbed player choice) would inevitably create discord.

Anyway, now you have choices. You stick with your original leader for the whole game and can carry on with your starting civ if you want. Its historical heyday is its Apex Age, where you can select special units, buildings, and other bonuses — e.g., antiquity is the time when Greece shines. They turn into time-tested civs outside the Apex Age, which is fancy-speak for saying “they just keep functioning.” But during time-tested ages, you get the benefits of syncretism, a new thing where you pick a special feature from a civ in its Apex Age that has some historical relevance to your civ and incorporate it. Or you can skip that and “affirm” your traditions, which gives you a different set of bonuses and an extra slot for a tradition to sort of solidify your civ’s identity.

Image: Firaxis Games/2K Games via Polygon

Firaxis handles these choices wonderfully. In one game, I played as Alexander the Great aiming for a cultural victory and had several options during the Age of Exploration. One of them was the Norman motte and bailey, a defensive structure that had absolutely no place in my land of peace and culture, and a different civ that unlocked a new unique quarter. The choice was obvious, but the fact that there was a choice I could pick to further my ambitions — and the possibility of different strategies next time — made age transitions much more exciting and flexible. Not every real-life case of cultural and political assimilation happened by force. Some were just expedient. Making room for this kind of in-game choice ends up being a better fit for the kind of historically minded gameplay Firaxis wanted all along.

Changes to victory conditions make progress feel more natural, too. Gone, mercifully, is the race to stockpile treasure fleets for an economic victory or the oh-so-boring rush to dig up artifacts to win at being cultured. Economic victories are cumulative now, based on your civ’s GDP, and your civ’s GDP increases for every slotted resource and gold-generating building, along with treasure convoys and factory resources like before. Cultural victory hinges on tourism, which you bump up with wonders, celebrations, natural wonders, unique quarters, and so on. In short, these arefinallyvictories you build towards throughout a match, not just annoying gimmicks you work around. Military and science victories are basically the same, which is fine since they were decent to start with (though earning “science points” throughout the ages gives you some incentive toward specializing).

Peppered in between these larger victories are small ones called “triumphs,” which are essentially customizable achievements that complement your strategy. It’s a robust set of goals that includes the original victory paths, along with bonuses for expansion, exploration — all the stuff outside the major victory conditions. Earning them gets you “dedications,” which are like your legacy rewards from before, but pulled from a broader pool and generally more useful. It’s a welcome way to keep momentum going in between major milestones, particularly during the Age of Exploration, which still suffers from poor pacing.

Happiness is where things start to get a bit shaky, though. Grades of happiness, more incentives to hold celebrations, bonuses that happen only at certain happiness levels — these are welcome features. They’re also totally possible to ignore, at least outside the highest difficulty levels. Even after exceeding my settlement cap, I managed to have every city, including angry ones I stole from other nations during war, producing 20 or more happiness and quite a lot more in my capital and homeland cities. There’s some strategy involved in picking the right policies and making room for happiness buildings, but it still feels more like a checklist than a grand design. Pick that building. Slot that resource. Same as you did before.

The checklist feeling still applies to religion and diplomacy as well, andCiv 7‘s weakest elements are made to feel even more rickety and unfinished in light of how much Test of Time improved. Religion comes with some highly useful add-on buffs you can pair with very specific playstyles, but they’re not useful enough to make religion feel necessary — or even enjoyable. I got distracted with a war in one match and forgot to keep converting, a slip of the mind made possible by conversion’s inessential nature. Then the age’s crisis lurched over the horizon, and it was a religious one. I’m told the people were rioting in the streets, driven to public acts of zealotry and expressing violent discontent in cities with even a sniff of my religion or opposing ones. What I saw instead was the happy Buddhist farmers of Athens mingling with the urbanite Catholics as the city became evenmore joyous than it was before. (Crises definitely need more work, too.)

Government changes add some excellent specialization options and make your choices feel worthwhile, unless they’re tied to diplomacy. I was a good ancient Greek and prioritized democracy and representative republican governments during my Alexander playthrough. That, plus a few influence-oriented policies, meant I regularly had a surplus of influence numbering in the hundreds, sometimes over 1,000. And yet despite having policies and traditions built around interactions with other leaders, those interactions areso stiflingly limited. Over a year after launch, your diplomatic options are:

Would you like to trade?
Would you like to party?
I hate you
I’m going to steal your stuff
Please take my money. I’m feeling generous and/or guilty

There is some satisfaction in starting a war, then pouring excess influence into extra war support so your opponent is desperate to end it and gives you free cities so you’ll agree. But that’s just mugging on a global scale — not strategy.

Still,Civ 7‘s recent updates fixed some of its biggest problems, and, in so doing, softened the rigidity that made each playthrough feel so similar to another. There’s still some way to go before its other, less enjoyable features are as hearty as they could be, and some, like city planning, have changed very little with these new updates. But I’m hopeful Firaxis is on the right track now and knows how to makeCiv 7 thrive, even if it takes a while longer.