Civilization VII: coming in August 2024: coming in 2025 I hope they just don’t add more layers of complexity (like religions, climate change, world congress…) without assessing if it is actually fun to play.
I liked some ideas of Civ VI, like districts and the tech/culture boost. I did not like the rest very much. The game feels bloated with mechanics that do not work well together.
Think of the climate thing: you either avoid coastal cities, which is huge since they are way more powerful than land-only cities, or you rush towards the Computer tech to avoid the effects of climate change. This does not work well with the rest of the game, it means that with this feature enabled you basically have only one path forward that is to boost research until you can counter that effect and leave the fight for the late game.
Another example: I liked the idea of “free cities”, but they are so freaking aggressive and OP that you end up missing barbarians instead.
Also religion is broken: there is really no diplomatic way to stop missionaries and the alike, so you are in the absurd situation in which you are maybe the first power in the world and you risk loosing to a three cities civ that is strong in faith.
And I still did not mention the terrible AI and the freaking world congress. The latter infuriates me the most as they had a similar mechanics that worked flawlessly in Alpha Centauri: they just had to copy it.
I hope they think VII a little bit more thoroughly.
