BoM/TWS Message Forum

Carried over from a discussion of Civilization 7 that started on the blog:

Yeah, I'm undecided about the Age Transitions. I'll have to play more to really get a firm opinion. I suspect I'll land firmly in the middle, mushy "Meh".

On the one hand, I do like that the move from one age to another now feels like a genuine transition rather than being a screen change between arbitrarily chosen turns.

The downside is that it feels kind of pointless -- just enough of a hiccup that you can say "Okay, something changed" but not enough to really be meaningful.

In fact, if I do wind up disliking them, it won't be because they are disruptive, but because they are not nearly disruptive enough!

So ...

To me it seems clear they are playing with Arnold Toynbee's idea that civilizations are born amidst and die amidst crises. Briefly:

Toynbee argues that a civilization is created when a society is forced to grapple with an existential challenge, so that it has to evolve traditions, beliefs, and practices that not only see off the challenge but provide the society with a sense of identity and meaning. The resulting civilization will then exist in a stable and mostly unchanging state until it meets another existential challenge. In the face of this challenge it could evolve within its already existing structures to face down the challenge. But more often than not the society proves too conservative, usually because it's in the grip of an elite that is too wedded to the status quo to respond creatively to the challenge. The result is an intensifying crisis that more or less causes the civilization to liquidate itself. From the resulting chaos a new civilization fashions itself with novel and creative solutions to the original challenge (and to the challenge of civilizational collapse).

A classic example of this is the transition from the Hellenic civilization (which encompasses not only Greece but also Rome) to the Western Christian civilization, but he identifies lots of other revolutionary periods in other parts of the world. He also identifies the Egyptian civilization as one that managed to putter along for a couple of thousand years without meeting another existential challenge, and so remained more or less completely unchanged until the polity itself was annexed into the Hellenistic world.

I think this is what the designers of Civ7 are going for. They may also be influenced by the Civ4 mod "Rhye's and Fall of Civilization," during which it was common for a player's civilization to collapse from internal stresses and strains, and which also included a mechanic for switching from one civilization to another; and yet another mechanic in which collapsed AI-led civilizations could reappear under a new name in the same territory.

So in Civ7 there are these "crisis" periods when you are forced to run destabilizing civics; and then you get a new name with a new set of attributes; some of your settlements revert to a more primitive state; and some of your improvements suffer yield losses.

But this is all an external put-up job. The game puts you on railroad tracks by just declaring that it's time for a crisis. It would be much truer to Toynbee/Rhye's -- and I think it would be a lot more FUN -- if the collapse was total; if it was caused by the player; and if it was a deliberate strategy pursued by the player in order to reorganize his civilization after it got itself into a hole.

So, imagine:

1. You are able to slot in social policies for your government, but you are not able to change them once they are in. You are only able to insert new policies as new government slots are opened. This cramps your ability to respond to new challenges as they arise.

2. Certain technologies and civics (and builds) come with negative social policies, which you are forced to implement.

3. But that's okay, because there are other technologies/civics/builds that ameliorate the negative policies. Except these come with other negative social policies. The result is that you get forced deeper and deeper into a suboptimal corner, and the shape of that corner is created by your own choices.

4. Also, the tech and civics trees are much larger -- so large that it is impossible to research everything in the era -- and they spread out in ramifying branches instead of being a linear progression; and some advances close off other parts of the tree, so you can never research more than a part of the trees. Net result: which techs/civics you research depend upon which problems you've given yourself, which in turn will force certain additional problems upon you, etc.

5. Eventually you are no longer able to research techs/civics, and will also be stuck with the government you have created and the builds you've made, and you will not be able to evolve out of the cul-de-sac. At this point the game switches to just give you negative policies that you have to implement.

6. But once you are at the end of a tree, you are also given a "crisis" button that you can hit at any time of your choosing. In fact, you are given a choice of buttons: an "Invasion" button; a "Revolution" button; a "Climate Catastrophe" button; a "Crisis of Faith" button; maybe some other kind of button. Press it, and over the next dozen turns you will get hit with a catastrophe so big that you will lose huge amounts of things: cities, improvements, population, researched techs and civics, etc. Over those dozen turns you will fight desperately with what you've got to save as much from the enveloping chaos as you can.

7. But when the crisis passes, you are given a bunch of "credits" that will let you recover a certain amount of buildings, techs/civics, improvements, population, cities, units, etc., from the wreckage. You will also be able to start fresh with a new government with totally empty policy slots; a new religion; a new tech/civics tree; new attributes; and no negative policies in place. You even get a new name if you want.

8. And then the cycle starts all over again ... (Except that you're much further along with overall tech/civics, etc., because you will start with at least 75% of what you'd previously built.)

N.B. The crises would be particular to each civilization and would not all happen at the same time, because they would be a player choice when to launch them.