Civilization VII hands-on: This strategy sequel rethinks the long game

From squares to hexes, from tech trees to civic trees, over its more than 30 years across seven mainline entries, the Civilization franchise continues to evolve.

Firaxis, the studio that has developed the Civilization games for many years, has a mantra when making a sequel: 33 percent of the game stays the same, 33 percent gets updated, and 33 percent is brand new.

Recently, I had the opportunity to play Civilization VII, the next entry, which is due to launch in February 2025. The build I played was an early alpha build, but the bones of the game it will become were there, and it’s interesting to see which third Firaxis kept the same and which third it has reimagined.

It turns out that the core of the game that its developers won’t much want to change is the turn-to-turn experience. But in the case of Civilization VII, all bets are off when it comes to the overall arc of the journey from sticks and stones to space travel.

Rethinking the structure of a Civilization game

Most of the time, playing Civilization VII feels a lot like playing Civilization VI—but there’s one big change that spans the whole game that seems to be this sequel’s tentpole feature.

That’s the new Ages system. The long game is now broken into three segments: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. Each Age has some unique systems and gameplay, though most systems span all three.

Within each age, you’re given a handful of “Legacy Paths” to choose from. These map closely to the franchise’s long-standing victory conditions: Science, Economic, Cultural, and Military. The idea is that you pick the Legacy Path you want to pursue, and each Legacy Path has different success conditions that change across each of the three Ages.

These conditions are big and broad, and Firaxis thankfully hasn’t gotten too jazzy with them. For example, I played in the Age of Antiquity and pursued the Cultural path, so my goal was to build a certain number of Wonders before the end of the Age.

In some ways, this is similar to the boom-and-bust cycle of Dark and Golden Ages in Civilization VI, but I found it much more natural in VII. In VI, I often found myself making arbitrary-seeming choices I didn’t think made sense for my long-term strategy just to game the system and get the Age transition I wanted. In this new game, the Legacy Path objectives are likely to always be completely in line with the overall victory strategy you’re pursuing.

One of the advantages of this new structure is support for shorter games that aren’t just hyper-compressed versions of a larger game. Previously, the only way to play a game of Civilization that wasn’t a dozen or more hours long was to pick one of the faster game speeds, but that fundamentally changed how the game felt to play.

This is a Roman city, but you could have a non-Roman historical leader, like Egypt’s Hatshepsut, at the helm.

Credit: 2K Games

Now, Civilization VII gives you the ability to play a match that’s just one Age, if you choose to.

The new Ages system is integrated with another big change: your choice of leader and civilization are no longer tied together when you start a new game, and they’re not set in stone, either.

Now you pick both a civilization and a leader separately at the start—and you can do some weird, ahistorical combinations, like Greece’s Alexander as the leader of China. Each leader and civilization offers specific bonuses, so this gives more customization of your playstyle at the start.

It doesn’t end there, though. At the end of each Age, you can essentially change civilizations (though as far as I could tell, you stick with the leader). Firaxis says it took inspiration for this feature from history—like the fact that London was a Roman city before it became an English one in the Medieval era.

Which civilization you can transition to is dictated by what you did within the Legacy Path system, among other things.

The amount of time I had to play the game was just enough to almost finish the Antiquity Age, so I didn’t get to see this in action, but it sounds like an interesting new system.

It’s still Civilization

Changes to Ages and civilization selection aside, Civilization VII is a direct successor to Civilization VI in terms of its features and design.

For example, the puzzle of picking hexes near your city center for building districts and wonders (and the system of adjacency bonuses for those things) returns, with some tweaks and optimizations. In general, managing cities is very similar to before.

The technology and civic trees are conceptually similar to what we saw in Civilization VI as well. All this is to say that if you felt Civilization VI was going in the wrong direction, you won’t like VII either—it extrapolates the systems in VI out to their natural directions based on that game’s trajectory.

The most essential elements of a modern Civilization game, like spaces with resource yields and building city districts in nearby hexes, return.

Credit: 2K Games

As a longtime Civ player, I found myself getting into the rhythm of things almost immediately based on past experience. Even when something notable changed, it was usually just a more efficient way to do the old thing. For example, you used to have to move workers or builders around the map to hexes that you want to build city improvements on. Now you just do that from the city view, with no units involved. The choices are the same, there are just fewer clunky inputs and less busy work.

Another way of thinking about it is that Firaxis has taken an aggressive approach to reframing the experience at a full-game-length scale, but it has been a little more conservative when tweaking the gameplay at a turn-to-turn scale.

Smaller changes (that still add up to a lot)

Combat is similar, as well. But if you’re a Civilization fan who misses the “stacks of death” (armies made up of numerous military units all stacked onto one tile and moving together) from Civilization IV and earlier, Firaxis is throwing you a little bone. You can now use the game’s equivalent of Great Generals to stack units all in one space for movement across the map. You then deploy the units to surrounding hexes once you’ve arrived where you’re headed.

As a fan of stacks of death, I appreciated this middle ground. I still think the hex-based combat can get unwieldy with larger armies, but at least that mostly happens in the context of strategic decision-making during an assault or defense, not when trying to move the units across the map. I still wish there was a way to toggle stacks of death as an option when you start the game, for those who prefer the older style of play.

Diplomacy is a much deeper system now, generally to the game’s benefit.

2K Games

Diplomacy is a much deeper system now, generally to the game’s benefit. 2K Games

Managing all your military units in the late game is still a chore, but at least you can stack them for long-distance deployments now.

2K Games

Managing all your military units in the late game is still a chore, but at least you can stack them for long-distance deployments now. 2K Games

Diplomacy is a much deeper system now, generally to the game’s benefit. 2K Games

Managing all your military units in the late game is still a chore, but at least you can stack them for long-distance deployments now. 2K Games

Apart from Ages, diplomacy is the most heavily overhauled main system. I’ve long felt that diplomacy didn’t have enough going on in prior Civilization titles—and in Civilization VI, it was such a small part of the game I often didn’t even really engage with it.

In Civilization VII, you still talk to leaders by clicking on their pictures to open a diplomacy panel. And it looks similar: Your proposals are on the left, and theirs are on the right, and you try to make a deal. But there is a much wider range of proposals available, from big things to small things, and there’s a new resource akin to gold, science, or culture points that you can spend to get better outcomes from deals. Oftentimes, even something as simple as a research deal will have multiple versions depending on how much of this resource you invest in it.

This makes diplomacy a lot more engaging, nuanced, and useful than it was before. It’s probably my favorite change in Civilization VII.

Impressions after three hours with the game

In my view, there are three types of people who might be interested in first-hand impressions of the next Civ game: people who have been playing recent Civ games and are curious about upgrading to the next version; people who were Civ fans years ago but haven’t been as into recent titles; and people who aren’t Civ fans but are interested in trying it out.

It’s hard for me to speak to the third of those, since I’ve spent hundreds of hours on every Civilization game since Civilization II. Firaxis says it has redone the tutorial experience and that it believes this is the best time to jump into the franchise, and that’s supported by the fact that it’s releasing simultaneously on consoles (where there are likely fewer players familiar with the franchise) for the first time.

But as an experienced player, I’m not in a position to judge how successful it was at that. I will say that I did do some of the tutorial, and it didn’t seem any more accessible than before as it was presented in the alpha build. That could change later in development, though.

I can speak to the other two groups better. If you’re coming from Civilization V or Civilization VI, you’re generally going to find Civilization VII very familiar.

There were a lot of changes in VI that I didn’t care for, like the lack of diplomatic options and the technology inspiration and Dark Age/Golden Age systems that led to players making weird, strategically inconsistent choices to meet arbitrary goalposts. It was my least favorite Civilization.