If you read my review of Civilization VII, then you know that I have some significant reservations with the way that Firaxis broke the game up into 3 distinct ages. This has easily been the most controversial change in a game that made a lot of questionable decisions.

I'm not going to speak for other players, nor am I going to repeat my review, but my biggest issues with the ages of Civ VII are as follows:

• The ages end suddenly, without giving the player an opportunity to finish ongoing tasks,
• The age transitions skip the transitionary periods in between ages,
• The crises don't always feel like fair tests of an empire's stability.

First and foremost, I'm not going to propose that the ages should just be removed. The ages are too fundamental to the game's design and Firaxis' vision for it. But more importantly, I don't actually think that the solution should be to throw out the baby with the bath water. There are redeeming qualities to the ages as well (which I also talked about in my review). As such, I want to take a few moments to share some ideas that I have for how the above issues could potentially be addressed by Firaxis in future updates, DLC, or expansions.

I'm also going to present the idea in order of complexity and ease-of-implementation, from the simplest and easiest changes, to the most involved. The simpler ideas could easily be patched into the game, while some of the more complicated ideas could require a bigger DLC or expansion.

Ages end suddenly, and often prematurely.

When Civilization VI released, it was criticized by many as being a "do-over of Civ V." It was, indeed, a much more iterative release than many other Civ games have been, taking the concept of "un-stacking" units that was pioneered by Civ V, and expanding that to include un-stacking of cities. Then it threw in some iterative changes to many other core systems that had been introduced in Civ V, such as city states, religion, trade routes, and archaeology (to varying degrees of success). The end result is that Civ VI felt very familiar to anyone who had played Civ V.

That is absolutely not the case with Civilization VII, which enters life in a much more competitive market, and may have felt pressured to do things different. Civilization isn't the only dog in the yard anymore, when it comes to historic 4-x strategy gaming. For the first time in the series' history, it has real competitors in the form of Amplitude's Humankind, Microsoft's Ara: History Untold, Paradox's Millennia, and others. In fact, Civ VII seems to have taken many design cues from these competitors, and there definitely seems to be a lot of convergent design.

For example, Civilization VII borrows the idea of changing cultures between the different eras, which was introduced by Humankind. It divides the game up into 3 distinct Ages, similar to how Ara divides its gameplay up into 3 Acts. And all of Humankind, Millennia, Ara, and Civ VII feature units that stack together into armies. And that says nothing about all the "live service"-inspired systems that have been added, such as cumulative progression rewards for each leader, profile badges, and so forth. These all represent pretty dramatic departures from what Civ V and Civ VI were doing, and I'm not sure if I like the way that these creative choices have affected this version of Civilization.

3 ages of history

The division of the game into 3 Ages is probably going to be the most controversial change, since it fundamentally changes the way that the game is played.

Civilization VII is not designed as a single, seamless trek through alternate human history. Instead, it is basically divided up into 3 smaller, more focused games, each with their own distinct gameplay mechanics and goals. I couldn't find any statements from 2K or Firaxis that the ages were implemented in order to better facilitate multiplayer, but that seems to be the consensus among the game media. Many articles (from GameRant, The Gamer, and others) highlight how each of the ages can be played as a stand-alone multiplayer game that is much shorter than a traditional game of Civ, thus resulting in more mutliplayer sessions that actually go to a proper resolution, rather than everyone simply stopping because it's 3 in the morning.

This is great for players who do want to be able to complete a game, and reach a proper ending within a single afternoon. It's less good for players who do want a full, Civilization game. Put simply, the Ages create hard stops and resets at pre-determined points in the game, which hurts the sense of continuity when playing a full game.

The game is divided into 3 ages, with hard resets in between each age.

An age might just end when I'm in the middle of doing something, or with there still being things that I wanted to accomplish. Maybe I wanted to settle another city, or capture another player's city, or annex a city state, or build a wonder? Nope. Can't. The age just ends, and the game kicks me back out to a loading screen before advancing straight to the start of the next era, which may skip decades or centuries on the in-game calendar.

Sid Meier's Civilization computer game seems ripe for conversion into a board game. The PC game is, after all, basically just a computerized board game that plays out on a grander scale. Sid himself was inspired by many classic board games, including Risk and Axis & Allies. Fantasy Flight has already taken a stab at trying to distill the core mechanics of Civ down into a digestible board game when they released Sid Meier's Civilization: the Board Game back in 2010. I really like that game, even though it is a bit bloated and unwieldy. Attempting to directly translate Civ's mechanics down into board game form unsurprisingly results in a fairly complicated game that takes a very long time to learn and play.

Fantasy Flight's approach this time around seems to be to develop an elegant board game, and then apply the Civilization license onto it. The result is a board game that feels much more distant from the computer game, but which plays much more smoothly as a board game.

Civilization, streamlined

Perhaps the biggest problem with the older Civilization board game is the game length and amount of downtime. Games could run for over five hours, and the fact that each player resolved their entire turn phase (city management or army movement) before moving onto the next player meant that you could end up sitting for 20 to 40 minutes, twiddling your thumbs and waiting for other players to resolve their turns. That is one of my biggest peeves with a lot of epic games: too much downtime.

A New Dawn is a very elegant game.

A New Dawn addresses that problem by having each player take only a single action in each of their turns. There are no phases; just take an action from your focus bar and then move on to the next player. Turns, therefore, are very quick, turnaround time is very short, and the game moves along at a rapid pace. This, ironically, serves to better maintain the "one more turn" addictive nature of the computer game. You might find yourself neglecting bathroom breaks for several turns because things are moving along so swiftly. Your turn is generally quick enough that you want to finish it before you step away or take a break, and other players' turns are so quick that you don't want to step away because you know it'll be back around to your turn in a few minutes.

Longer games with longer turns and more downtime can also often result in players outright forgetting what they were planning on doing by the time the turn gets back around to them. Either that, or the large amounts of moves and actions that the other players take changes the game state so much that, when your turn comes around, the thing you were planning on doing is no longer ideal -- if it's even possible.

That's rarely a problem in A New Dawn because each player does one thing on their turn, so the state of the board isn't radically changing between your turns. It's much more of a gradual change. That doesn't mean that other players can't disrupt your plans; they certainly can, especially when combat between players starts happening. It just means that you aren't going to be sitting there bouncing up and down in your chair waiting to pull off a spectacular move, only to have another player blow up all your plans at the last minute and leave you spending far too long wondering "What the heck do I do now?" when your turn starts...

Earlier today, I served as a guest host for the Civilization podcast Polycast, episode 295. I joined regular hosts DanQ, Makahlua, MadDjinn, and TheMeInTeam. The episode covered a handful of topics, ranging from the new religion mechanics introduced by the fall 2017 patch, to a proposal for athletes to be a type of great person, the new Civilization: A New Dawn board game, to the issue of micro-transactions (or "Recurrent Consumer Spending" as Take-Two Interactive CEO, Strauss Zelnick calls it), and more.

If you missed the live broadcast, then the edited archive version will be released on PolyCast's website next Saturday (December 2). I'll update this post with a link once the archive is updated.

"Recurrent Consumer Spending"

"Recurrent Consumer Spending" was one of the primary topics of the previous episode (PolyCast #294), and so we discussed it again as part of a discussion on feedback from last week's episode. Micro-transactions (and loot boxes in particular) are a hot topic in gaming of late, especially after the fiasco that was EA's launch of Star Wars: Battlefront II. Games pundit Jim Sterling has made micro-transactions an almost weekly issue in his Youtube podcast The Jimquisition. Sterling has been comparing loot boxes to gambling for months, and recently, some European regulatory agencies have started to evaluate whether loot boxes should legally be classified as a type of gambling. As someone who has previously worked for a gambling company, I am aware of how compulsive impulses are used to keep gamblers addicted to a particular game, and I definitely believe that the current implementation of loot boxes in games like Shadow of War, Call of Duty, and Star Wars: Battlefront does try to capitalize on those same addictive impulses, and so should probably be regulated similarly to gambling. I don't want micro-transactions in my games at all, but I don't necessarily think that such things should be illegal per se. But they should be regulated, and I do think that the game boxes should clearly indicate to parents that the game includes "gambling-like elements" (or some other warning).

More importantly (for me), however, is the concerns for what micro-transactions do to the actual game. Just last night, I spent something like 4 hours in Shadow of War grinding my character and orc captains up to a point that I could siege the castle in Act II. I played every side mission available in the chapter, and then still had to do some Nemesis missions, in order to get Talion up to level 20 and unlock the ability to assign a third uruk captain to my siege assault. That third captain was essential to get my siege level up above the level of the defenders. I'm not sure if that was necessary, but I didn't want to risk having my captains killed during the attack. I actually happen to really like Brûz The Chopper, so I didn't want him dying because my siege was under-leveled. This is just Act II! I can't imagine how grindy the game might become during the later acts! And all this extra grind in the campaign is a direct result of the inclusion of the game's War Chest (i.e. loot boxes). You can spend real-life money to buy random orc captains to use in your sieges or to defend your captured forts. So the whole game is balanced such that it's just enough of a grind to encourage people to spend money to speed things along by buying the War Chest.

Well, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has said that he wants every game in 2K's library to include "recurrent consumer spending". That would include my beloved Civilization...

This past weekend, I was once again honored to be invited onto the Polycast podcast about the Civilization games. This was my third time on the show since the release of Civilization VI (back in November). Those two episodes were focused more about initial impressions of the game. This time, we got to have some more substantive discussions.

The 1-hour archive of the episode can be streamed from civcomm.civfanatics.com/polycast/polycast/season9/episode223.mp3:

This archived episode is edited down to 1 hour (from a 2-hour recording), so not all the following topics may be included in this particular episode. The remaining topics may be included in later episodes, so be sure to check back at Polycast.net if you want to hear it all!

The bulk of our discussions were focused around a handful of Civfanatics forum topics regarding criticisms and suggestions for enhancing the district mechanics. The first thread was about users' ideas for possible districts in any inevitable expansion for the game. This gave me an opportunity to link back to a previous blog that I had written about my own ideas for new districts (and other ways to make better use of the game's map). Ideas from other users ranged from new districts focused around diplomacy and envoy-generation, to railroad hub districts, a fortress / castle district, espionage district, and (of course) a canal district. Other users pitched the idea of stacking multiple districts into a single tile. This idea seemed unfavorable to the Polycast hosts (as well as myself), as it generally undercuts the fact that "unstacking" cities was a core design philosophy of Civ VI. However, it is worth pointing out that "unstacking" units was the core design philosophy of Civ V, but Civ VI added limited stacking back into the series. So back-pedaling on a philosophy of unstacking is not without precedent.

Russia is pretty much the only A.I. that places its districts well, due to its free extra border expansion.

The next topic was a thread about removing districts. The general consensus seemed to be that we were all in favor of having a city project to remove or relocate districts, if -- for nothing else -- but to relocate poorly-placed districts in captured A.I. cities. The last forum topic discussion was about user dunkleosteus' ideas about rethinking districts. I think we all agreed that the poster's ideas seemed to be far too complicated, but there are some ideas of merit in there. Having more options for further specializing districts and cities would be fine, and we'd all like to see more bonuses based on nearby districts and the map so that district placement doesn't feel quite so ... mechanical...