Civilization VII - coming February 11th

[whydoibother]

Who the fuck are even the Serbs or the Romanians and where do you put them? No correct answer, always many offended.

Old Great Bulgaria -> Bulgarian Tsardom -> Bulgaria/Romania/Serbia.

At start of game, pick a civilization. Those are BIG C civilizations, not modern nations.
You have a few turns to explore your land, and when you finish building your very first building, always Monument, you can pick 1 ancient leader of the ones available to your civilization. Having seen your land a bit, you can make a somewhat educated pick as to what you'd be doing early.
When you advance into the next era, you see a list of leaders available to your civilization, maybe currated by some accomplishment (need to have conquered a city to see Attila, need to have founded a religion to see Constantine, etc).
Also some leaders can appear to multiple civilizations:

• Pick Euroasian Steppes -> enter middle ages -> offered to pick Simeon of Bulgaria
• Pick Greco-Roman -> enter middle ages -> offered to pick Simeon of Bulgaria
• Pick Slavs-> enter middle ages -> offered to pick Simeon of Bulgaria

So you can have more niche cultures, that don't encompass enough time to be represented by a civilization, still have representation in one given era by their famous leader.
This way you can have a game with no Serbia, because who the fuck cares about Serbia, but you can still pick Tito if you started as the Slavs or the Greco-Romans or wherever you'd put Tito. Tito leader ability: during this era, don't accumulate debt; next era, go bankrupt.

 

[ropetight]

Picking a new civilization each era is a very basic mechanic, and not multicultural approach. Abstract everything away, make it so you are just moving pawns and there's numerical values. At the end of an era going from the military numbers to the economic numbers to consilidate is something that makes sense as an option. Like a skill respec in some RPG. Its also a common historical trope, from conquerors to administrators to enjoying the fine life too much, is how most empires are presented to us by writers. Yet with the static model, your civ either starts as "cultural" or stays "conquerors" all game, you can't pick new character trait to fit your new situation. Its obvious and common sense to try to add it, which Civ games tried before with the civics cards systems, with ideology, etc, allowing the player to pivot their game a bit.
With how pernament districts are, the Civ6 model absolutely needed some way to switch things around if you notice there's another 3 heavy religious civs in the game and your plan clearly won't work, or if you have such good land that aggressive expansion doesn't make sense and your leader abilities seem wasted.
Its not multiculti Soros whatever, that's marketing speak. Its necessary game design.

Necessary game design?
It is neccessary only in a way in which yearly Madden, Fifa of NBA2K are neccessary - to sell you "novelty".

"Borrowing" districts from Endless Legend was a mistake - made the game sluggish and too vertical building oriented.
And now to fix it, they "borrow" another gameplay mechanic from another Amplitude game.
That will surely work great.

Good luck making any kind of AI to work with this without being even stupider than it already was in previous Civs.
Maybe instead of lifting mehcanics from unsuccessful games, like true genre innovators, they could made AI which isn't retarded.
Now that is what I would call neccessary - making your game not suck.

 

[ropetight]

Tito leader ability: during this era, don't accumulate debt

Now this is a comedy, probably unintentional, but still.

 

[whydoibother]

Tito leader ability: during this era, don't accumulate debt

Now this is a comedy, probably unintentional, but still.

Debt is not real if you die before having to pay it.