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.
Make the Age Transition less sudden and jarring
The first problem is that the ages end very suddenly. An age just ends at the start of the turn after the conditions have been met. You don't even have an opportunity to play out that final turn!
How many turns do I have left?
10? Only 1?
There's a percentage indicator in the top left of the screen, but it the percentages can change quickly and dramatically as other civs complete objectives. As such, it doesn't give a clear indication of how many turns are left before the age ends. This means that as the percentage indicator gets into the 90's, the players can be left with no idea whether they have enough turns to complete a multi-turn task, such as completing a wonder, absorbing a city state, conquering a city you have under siege, or getting those last couple points to finish up a legacy path. Instead, at the start of the turn in which the requirements for ending the age have been completed, the age simply ends. The game doesn't even give an opportunity for the player to save the game before being forced out to the civilization-select screen.
This brings me to my first suggestions:
Add a "Save Game" button to the Age Transition screen
Adding a Save button to the Age Transition screen would give players an opportunity to save the game at the end of an age. This way, if you want to mulligan your legacy, civ, or memento selections, you will have an opportunity to do so.
Add a Turn Countdown to Age End
Adding a turn countdown before the age actually ends would also help make the end of an age feel less sudden and jarring. Since the age end is contingent on the actions of all the civs in the game, having a countdown until those actions have been completed is not practical. Instead, I think Civ VII should take a turn out of the books of Civ VI and Ara: History Untold. After the criteria for ending an age have been met, there should be an additional 10 or 20-turn buffer period, with a turn countdown, to allow players to finish up any straggling tasks before the end of the age, similar to how Civ VI gives a countdown before transitioning to a new era, or how Ara: History Untold gives a countdown till the end of one of its acts.
Ages end without the player having an opportunity to finish lingering tasks or objectives.
Do I have enough time to get that last Silk Road Legacy Point?
Make the transition between ages playable
The previous ideas were focused on giving more warning to the player that the end of an age is happening. Now I want to talk about ideas for actually extending the ages themselves. The simplest way to do this would probably be to simply add a "One More Turn" button at the end of an age. Just like with the "One More Turn" button that has been at the end of older Civ games, this would simply allow the player to continue playing after the age has ended. There could also be an "End Age" button that would allow the player to end the age when they want, once the conditions for ending an age are met.
In this way, if you want a few more turns to finish a wonder, or complete a siege of a city, then you'll have that opportunity.
Of course, this does get tricky in multiplayer. What if one player wants to end the age, but another player doesn't?
Resolve the crisis to end the age
Another big problem that I'm experiencing with Civ VII, but which I didn't really address in my review, is that the crises feel kind of toothless sometimes. Often, the age ends before the crises really gets going, or the crisis just doesn't last long enough to really pose much of a problem or existential threat to my civilization. It's more of a minor inconvenience, rather than something that actually demands my attention.
Maybe this has more to do with the difficulty setting? I'm playing on the "Sovereign" difficulty, which I'm guessing is probably the equivalent of the "King" difficulty of Civ VI. So the A.I. civs probably have some bonuses, which means they are speeding through the tech and civic trees faster, and therefore accelerating the end of the ages. The net result is that, so far, my strategy for all the crises has basically just been to not worry too much about it, and to just power through them until I (or the A.I. civs) trip over the conditions for actually ending the age. I don't really have to think long-term about what I do during a crisis, because I know that hard reset is coming, and the crisis will end whether I take proactive steps to solve it or not.
With that in mind, extending the crises such that they extend beyond the 100% completion of the Age would also be a way of adding a buffer period before the actual transition. Perhaps the crisis begins near the end of the Age (like it does now), but its Culmination step doesn't happen until the Age gets to 100% progress, and the Culmination of the crisis takes place over a number of turns after the 100% Age Progress threshold has been reached.
In this way, the Age would not actually end until the final culmination of the crisis has been resolved, thus making part of the transitional periods playable. Failing to properly address the situation could even result in a "Game Over". Or alternatively, successful resolution of the crisis could result in receiving an additional Legacy reward in the later Ages; while failing to successfully resolve the crisis could result in some kind of penalty for the next Age. This would force the player to have to fully engage with the crisis, and be more proactive about dealing with it. You couldn't just sit back and hit "End Turn" until the age (and the crisis) ends on its own; you would have to take actual steps to resolve the crisis. That might mean restoring happiness during a revolt, treating or curing the plague such that none of your cities are infected anymore, fully fighting off invading Independent Powers, and so on.
An example of a potential failure debuff could be that if you fail to completely eradicate a plague from your cities before the end of the Age, then you loose population in all your cities and towns at the start of the following Age, and get a penalty to population growth for the following Age. Similarly, if you fail to restore Happiness to your cities during a revolt crisis, then you could get a Happiness penalty in all your cities for the following Age, and/or some debuffs to your government.
Proactively resolving the end of age crisis should be a requirement for actually ending the age.
Transitional Dark Ages
A more extreme option would be to make the full period between ages playable. This would get rid of the sudden, hard stops that occur when an age ends, and would result in a more seamless play experience that is more in-line with a traditional Civ experience. It would also make these transitionary periods playable. Currently, when an age ends, the game skips over decades or centuries of time, and then starts a new age with all the new resources already revealed and improved, and with all the units already upgraded. Instead of all that happening automatically, behind the scenes, the player could have to play these transitionary stages.
This would provide extra little pockets of "exploration" scattered throughout the game. Players would be scrambling to secure the newly-revealed resources, while also upgrading their armies into the base-level units of the next Age.
I think the simplest way to do this, while still keeping most of the current vision and design philosophy of Civ VII in tact, would be to shift the end-of-age crises to be entirely after the age has ended. This would fill in some (or all) of the transitionary time between the end of one age and the start of the next. It would be closer to the way that Dark Ages worked in Civ VI's Rise & Fall expansion, except that you would always have a Dark Age (in the form of a crisis) after each age.
This would have the same effect of forcing the player to engage more fully with the crises. It would also have the added effect of filling in all the gaps between ages with fully playable gameplay.
Would any of these suggestions improve the experience for you?
Well, that's about all I have for now, in terms of suggestions for how I think the ends of ages could be revised to provide a better play experience for Civ VII players -- especially long-time veterans of the series. I want to emphasize that these are very broad outlines of very rough and formative ideas. As I play more, I might come up with other ideas, or I might expand on these ideas more. If I do, I may update this pots, or write follow-ups.
Of course, if you have your own ideas, I would love to hear about them in the comments below!
In the meantime, happy Civ-ing!