The next major Sid Meier’s Civilization VII update will make some fairly sizeable tweaks to Firaxis’ latest, not-greatest 4X strategy sim. It’ll rearrange the workings of age transitions, with a view to providing a bit more continuity between epochs and helping you finish your to-do list before crossing the threshold. We can expect a new commander, too – Trưng Nhị, sister to existing Vietnamese leader Trưng Trắc.
Perhaps most significantly, the feature will re-introduce auto-explore mechanics for scouts. This piques my interest, inasmuch as I haven’t ever thought critically about auto-explore mechanics, and now that I do, I realise I regard them with a mixture of enthusiasm and spite.
In theory, auto-explore is a boon for any 4X, because 4Xs have big maps and it’s a faff to blow away all that fog of war yourself. When playing Stellaris, especially, I consider my reconnaissance vessels the pick of the flock. In practice, however, I find that auto-explore mechanics sometimes make for more fuss and micromanagement, because when I said “explore at random”, I did not mean over there, you wally. Obviously you wouldn’t begin by heading east: the terrain tiles are far more abundant in POIs up north. Also, don’t move too far away because you’re a military unit, and I might need you to bonk a bandit camp or escort a settler or something. Finally, please don’t rile up any rival civs prematurely while you’re roving the wastes.
When it comes to Endless Legend, in which civs don’t have as many units to play with, I am always triggering auto-explore for a couple of turns, then taking my hero’s wrist in vexation when they mope off towards the least promising coastline. I am that terrible faux-delegator who complains of too much work but also won’t trust anybody else with the details.
I imagine 4X unit designers have spent a lot of time working out how to guesstimate the player’s intentions and ensure that the auto-exploration feels sensible. Be ye dev or little people, I welcome your own thoughts on the subject. Introducing some heavy-handed context-sensitivity helps, in my experience. In Civ 7, auto-exploring scouts will “[prioritize] tile reveals while automatically stopping in range of Discoveries and enemy zones of control”.
As for the ever-vexatious question of Ages, the next update (which has been teased on Reddit) will introduce a 10-turn countdown before each Age transition, so you can polish off your objectives in time. There’s also a continuity setting that preserves unit positions between ages, and you can expect leadership relationships to “evolve more smoothly”. The full patch notes will land alongside the update itself, sometime in the week of 20th July.
After a troubled launch showing, Civilization 7 is… still getting is arse kicked on Steam, with a mostly negative user review consensus ranging from people who played 0.4 hours before noticing the invasive kernel-level anti-cheat, to people who’ve played 2000 hours and come to the conclusion that they should not have. The last big update brought some very big maps, together with Steam Workshop support.
