Hands On Civilization VII – One for the ages

thesixthaxis.com:

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