I’m officially now worried I’ll play nothing but Civilization 7 for the rest of the year

Civilization 7’s greatest moments are those that aren’t planned.

When starting our first campaign with the new game, we thought we’d find our feet by setting up a quick cultural victory as a Machiavelli-lead Rome. This would allow us to get to grips with the new units, the new leader upgrade system, and some of the new science and technology trees.

Civilization, or Civ between us friends, is a game that never takes revolutionary steps. Instead, it focuses on evolution and fixing things you didn’t think were broken.

As such, during our first game, it’s a hell of a lot of reading the descriptions of tech trees and planning our future victory once we leave the Exploration Age. Also crucial to our first play-through was coming to terms with the game’s new system for influencing other leaders in the game.

As you play through a match, you’ll acquire a currency just like gold or culture, which can be used when interacting with other civilizations. Essentially, this currently can be spent on opening borders between friendly or neutral states, exchanging cultural festivals, and other forced diplomacy.

While this does freshen up the sometimes stilted discussions between yourself and other leaders, we found that the amount of influence we were gaining felt slightly too much for the early game. This was also the case for every other leader, as it felt like we were constantly interrupted by other leaders negotiating with us.

This is a factor of things like open borders having turn-limits on them, meaning they have to be established, but we can see how, in a marathon game, this could be somewhat grating at the start when you’re trying to lay the foundations of your empire.

Civilization 7 also understands that not every player has missed Uni deadlines, “felt too unwell to work,” or otherwise neglected their real life for their dictatorial ambitions. A new quest system helps players walk towards the victory path they so choose.

Veteran players can color outside the lines here, but this is a smart change to help new players who’ve heard the amazing emergent stories that can come from Civ but are too intimidated by a game that asks you to set aside 12 hours of your time to complete one match.

The early decades of the game get a refresh in that, from our experience, we weren’t fighting off bandits within a couple of turns, which was basically the default starting position in the last few entries. Instead, our early Civilization 7 experience was far more about establishing our first two settlements and building them into thriving cities. That’s another change, you can’t just build a second settler from the word go and send them off to establish an infinite web of cities. Settlers are unlocked in the technology tree, and even when you have them, once they’re sent on their way, they can only establish towns.

In order to upgrade that town into a city, you need a significant amount of gold. The game also warns you early on that establishing too many settlements without the money, influence, or citizens to support them can lead to a huge drop in happiness, which any veteran Civilization player will know can be kryptonite to a great run.

Machiavelli’s Rome was going well, we’d established a nice triangle of cities along the coast with ample food and other resources. We’d also been speccing in such a way that everything we did contributed to our future cultural victory. Classic Great Wonders return, and each civilization has unique buildings that can be combined into unique quarters in cities. We were on good terms with all of the leaders we’d met on our continent and things were going smoothly.

“Our early Civilization 7 experience was far more about establishing our first two settlements and building them into thriving cities.”

That’s when, of course, a large number of spearmen and archers appeared from the mist of our empire’s eastern border. It was at this point that we realized that in the midst of us speedrunning to invent the written word, music, and the air fryer we’d forgotten to build a military of any description. A warrior that we’d built in the very early game had been sitting in our capital city doing essentially nothing. We had a modest navy but they weren’t going to do a thing against the encroaching army.

Our enemies came from an NPC village, not one of the main opposition leaders. We had very little interest in a military campaign at all. In fact, had we been going the warmonger route, we were building the exact type of civilization that one would target in the early game because we were so weak.

We quickly lose a settler who was primed to establish our fourth settlement deeper into the center of the continent, and things look bleak. It quickly becomes time to empty the war chest. All of our hard-fought gold that was being saved to leapfrog our civilization ahead of the pack once we unlocked new buildings was being wasted on archers, spearmen, and other soldiers.

All of our great infrastructure projects come to a screeching halt as we deal with these pests. Other leaders are nipping in our ears about cultural festivals and open borders while we’re sending an utterly over-the-top amount of soldiers to eliminate a small village that provides very little tactical advantage, other than stopping them from stealing our people.

It feels like decades go by as we’re chasing their military leader who can outrun our foot soldiers and stay out of attack range. We’re getting notifications that other civilizations are speeding past us. A half-built Colosseum sits mocking us like a Lego set you bought and never had time for. A second, unknown army appears to our north.

The time for culture is over. War declared. Civ is back. We have work in 4 hours.