I’m a massive Civ fan and have been for half my life at this point and I was totally flabbergasted at how awful 7 turned out.
I didn’t expect it to be some kind of historical materialism simulator because 6 definitely felt like more of a (liberal) history-themed board game and I loved it for that, but holy hell what a disaster. I refunded the complete edition after like 4 hours and am really glad I did. I feel like every time I learn something new about the game it’s some horrible design choice like removing canals, or making economic victories dependent on railroads (???), or getting rid of the policy system, or getting rid of city states… the list goes on and on. For every good idea they had, like replacing barbarians with Independent Peoples, there’s like 4 dealbreakers.
Making your whole civ reset when the age changes is straight up braindead and feels like both a terrible misinterpretation of how and why crises unfold throughout history and also a band-aid solution to prevent anybody from getting “left behind”. At that point why not just have every civ win the game? It’s just so obvious that they made a game for smarmy streamers like Sips to “break” so they can slap it on their youtube channel and get 10 kajillion updoots and thereby get tons of free marketing.
And the UI my GOD. Hands down the ugliest UI in any civ game or any other 4X game I’ve played from the last 15 years. Sins of a Solar Empire looked better. Civ 5 looked better. It fr looks like an indie game made by a single person (and even then that’s no excuse because games like Stardew exist).
I could go on and on but you get the picture; Firaxis decided to rip off a lesser title like Humankind while also trying and failing to re-invent the wheel. 7 looks worse and plays worse than Revolutions and that was a nintendo DS game that cost a fraction of what I paid for 7.
Are you fr cuz that would explain a lot lol. The ui looked so refined in 5 & 6 by comparison