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.