Civilization 7 is still trying to fix up those gosh-danged Age transitions. For those just joining us, when you move between Ages in Firaxis’s latest historical map-painter, it’s sort of like starting over. You’re asked to pick a new Civilisation, appropriate to the Age, and your units will be reshuffled, downgraded and, in some cases, deleted like rabid dogs. The game also runs a broom over the geography, rearranging all the resources.
It’s supposed to be a pace-changer, and as a notorious earlygame drop-out, I can certainly see the logic behind that, but the feature has riled a lot of antique Civvers up. Firaxis have tweaked the Age system extensively post-launch, but many recent Steam reviews still list it as a downside. This week, they rolled out yet another patch, while detailing plans for a new approach to Age transitions that is actually “harsher” than the original. It’s a bold (4X) strategy (game), Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for them.
A quick recap: Firaxis have previously introduced an Age transition impact setting, letting players choose between having the game gather up your units between transitions, as in the original design, and a new “continuity” option that retains their map locations.
“Continuity Mode is a nice way to allow players less disruption to their military campaigns if they like to be fighting continuously from one Age to the next,” explains Ed Beach, creative director. “I don’t use that setting often in my games, but I did enjoy it recently when I played a full campaign with Genghis Khan as my leader.” I do love the concept of Genghis Khan’s quest for world domination getting repeatedly reset by a bunch of bullshit periodisation. Naughty rampaging warlords! We’ll stop-start the WAAAAGH right out of you.
Much as Beach enjoys the new setting, he feels Firaxis erred in making it the new default while hiding the previous “Regroup” option in the advanced settings. This made it easy to forget which kind of transition you have enabled. As such, the latest patch on Steam and the Epic Games Store makes your choice of Age transition setting “sticky” between campaigns, together with game speed and difficulty.
Even as they soften the workings, however, Firaxis are devising another, “harsher” version of Regroup, “a setting we are tentatively calling Collapse”. There are no details as to why this is “harsher”, but “Collapse” implies further unit loss and degradation, I guess. Perhaps it’ll be a kind of “Dark Age” mechanic. “It’s still early in testing, and we’ll need time to see if it feels fun and fits well into the game,” Beach says. “If it does, we’ll look into when it might make sense to include it in a future update.”
That’s not all they wrote. The full patch notes for Civilization 7 update 1.2.4 also mention a few bug fixes, but none of these seem as momentous to my eye as the on-going Age discourse. Are you still playing? Have your feelings changed much since launch?
