If there’s one thing that never really made sense in Civilization games, it’s that the US of A could rival Ancient Egypt in a quest for supremacy, or that the British and Roman empires could run as contemporaries. That a single culture could persist through from prehistoric times, progress through countless technological leaps across the ages, and blast off into outer space to colonise the stars. The fact of the matter is that, for almost every meteoric rise of a nation throughout history, there has been a similarly meteoric collapse or massive internal change.
It’s something that I guess a lot of developers started to think about all at once in the wake of Civilization 6‘s 2016 release. Firaxis themselves took a stab at it with the Rise and Fall expansion, and the last couple years has seen Humankind, Millennia and the soon-to-be-released Ara: History Untold. Now Firaxis is having another go with Civilization 7, incorporating the concept of ages and the rise and fall of empires into the very fabric of the game.
Underneath it all, Civ 7 will feel like Civ 6 a lot of the time. There’s common ground with the visual direction, the way that cities will sprawl across many map tiles, there’s still separated technology and civic trees, and the military doom stacks of earlier games won’t be making a return… though there is a fresh approach to marshaling your military forces. The biggest changes will come to the overarching structure of a game and the progression of your nation.
Each game of Civ 7 will feature three distinct ages – Antiquity, Exploration, Modern – that will last up to 200 turns per age, but can be spurred along by player action and progress. As each age draws to a close, your civilisation will have to deal with change that sweeps across the world, and crises beset all the global powers, forcing you to shift priorities. Barbarians appearing at the gates will always focus the mind, and could see you seeking peace with a rival nation as you prepare for the next transition – you actually get to choose which crises you face by picking crisis cards at the end of the age.
These are, to a certain extent, the end times for your nation, but really it’s just about choosing what comes next. You’ll have a choice of what civilisation you want to become, with the game giving you a few options that will look at the historically accurate succession, as well as how you’re actually playing. If, for example, your Egyptians are roving the world on horseback, you’ll be given the option of becoming Mongolia in the Age of Exploration.
Within each age you’ll have a handful of Legacy Paths you can choose to follow, mapping to the Science, Economic, Cultural and Military victory conditions, and giving you campaign-long bonuses as you pursue these directions. Early on you can select which path you wish to follow and then they’ll push quests to you that match more of what you want, and in turn will inform the successive civs you can pick.
It all adds up to a fascinating new perspective on the way that history is retold and remixed within the 4X genre. Still, alongside this high-level change there’s also plenty of smaller tweaks and changes to refine the fundamental gameplay.
Cities will still spread across the map one tile at a time, but Civ 7 is a bit more restrictive in making each tile you place link back to the main city, instead of having free reign within a broader area. As you build improvements, construct wonders and iconic landmarks, those will persist with you through the ages, even as the general buildings in a city change and modernise. I can’t wait to see how this actually comes together, blending together the ages.
Leaders and civilisations are now separated, so a leader can stay with your nation through the ages, but also allowing Firaxis to broaden the historical figures that they include, so there will be more scientists and philosophers alongside the staple historical heads of state.
On the diplomatic side of things, you now accrue Influence, which is what you need to perform actions against other players, using it to pass treaties, combine resources through endeavours like cultural exchanges and markets, and apply sanctions. It’s also needed to interact with independent states that gradually grow out of the little villages you can find across the globe, and which you can potentially establish good relations with a integrate with your empire down the line.
Finding those little towns and scoping out natural wonders, you’ll naturally do the early-game thing of flinging scouts out into the wider world, and they can now hop into a little boat and paddle up navigable rivers. Of course, as you bump into other nations, you’ll quickly find the need to defend yourself, and Civ 7 brings with it a new way to stack units together.
Essentially, you now have a way of creating an actual army, thanks to the introduction of Commanders. Where Civ 6 had a very restrictive form of unit stacking, a Commander lets you gather together up to six units and send them into battle together. It’s the Commander that will now accrue experience, level up and work through a skill tree in a fashion that’s emblematic of how historical armies can build a rich tradition and reputation, even as they are reinforced with new troops and military doctrines change. One thing you’ll be able to research is the ability to directly reinforce a Commander from your city, pathing them through the world automatically to keep your frontline army at full strength.
With a short 30 minutes hands on with the game, starting from the very beginning, we could barely scratch the surface of these refreshed gameplay mechanics and ideas – with only one city, I couldn’t see how city and civ-wide resources are handled, or really dig into how trade routes have been overhauled through diplomacy, for example – but just this first glimpse, and what Firaxis has presented, gives a thoroughly intriguing evolution of the series.
Civilization VII is heading to release on 11th February 2025, and for the first time, it will be launching across both PC and consoles at the same time, available across PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
