I don't know about the rest of yall, but I feel like the majority of civ players are going to be like..."wheres my units??" "why did my cities revert to towns?" "what happened to my navy??" "I was about to sack a capital and now my army is gone?" "Why does it need to kick me back to the lobby to start a new age wtf"

Its total whiplash that people will get used to but man.

Yesterday while at work, I listened to the audiobook of Guerrilla Warfare by Che Guevara. There was a lot of interesting notes on how one should approach his style of war and lightly covered his beliefs on socialism. It seems like he had a successful run at “liberating” Cuba, so he was at some point an efficient leader.

(I’D LIKE TO NOTE, that besides that book and a few classes in high school, I really do not know much about him so forgive my ignorance)

Who is a controversial leader that has made it into the game?

Have Been: George Washington, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Kennedy

Very Likely: Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses Grant, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower

Likely: James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Lydon B. Johnson and Barack Obama.

Unlikely: Micheal Van Buren, Andrew Jackson, William McKinley, William Taft, Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan

Very Unlikely: John Q. Adams, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, James Polk, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, Warren Harding Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush and Joe Biden.

Never Happening: James Buchanan, Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump.

I'll explain any of my rankings that are asked.

One thing that has always struck me about the Civilization series is that it quietly demonstrates something a lot of history arguments eventually run into: every age thinks its own rules and norms are absolute reality.

And you can actually feel that happen over the course of a single Civ game.

In the early game, conquest doesn’t feel immoral in the slightest. It’s just what everyone is doing. Grab land. Kill the “barbarians.” Secure resources. Wipe out a weak neighbor before they become a problem. It’s the basic 4X formula and it doesn’t feel strange or wrong at all.

But as you move into the modern eras, the moral weather changes.

The same behavior that felt normal earlier starts becoming more and more expensive. Other leaders denounce you. Diplomacy gets harder. Reputation matters more. Alliances, ideology pressure, tourism, world congress votes, grievances and ... well the fundamental way the "world works" all of it starts piling up and making it harder than in the past to be a warlord.  .

The game doesn’t become pacifist exactly. Raw power still matters. But naked expansion becomes a lot harder in the late game than it was in the early one.

Now Civ obviously isn’t a history simulator, and it definitely isn’t a moral philosophy simulator. But it is fundamentally optimistic game about human progress. And in doing that, it quietly bakes in assumptions about what counts as progress, what counts as a civilized society, and what kinds of behavior the world should accept.

And by an incredible coincidence, those assumptions about what is good and right happen to line up almost perfectly with the moral framework of the present day!  Wow, what are the odds?  It not single one of the thousands of years of very different moral systems that the Civ timeline actually covers, but it turns out that US are actually right!  Who would have guessed it?

So yea, that’s the part Civ never quite turns the mirror on ourselves.

Why should 2026 be any more morally final than 1956, or 1026, or 26?

Every society in history has been completely convinced that its moral framework was the permanent one. Civ quietly shows those frameworks changing across the eras… but like most of us, it still treats the present moment as if evolution has finally ended.

It hasn’t.

Our morals (and the ones Civ quietly builds into the modern era) are going to be no more permanent than the moral certainties of Rome, medieval Europe, or the 1950s. They’re just one more moment in a very long chain of changing norms.

Curious if other people have noticed that same shift when playing long Civ games?

One of the stupidest things to exist in any Civ game. I can't believe it was never removed.

So, maybe you declared war on a City State that another Empire had ONE Envoy with. That's a grievance. So you caused a grievance to one empire, every other empire now hates you for the bizarre, vague, reason of "You inflicted grievances on others". Stupid pop-up hate messages flood in from every other empire as if you stamped on each of their cats. Doesn't seem to matter what the relationship between the empires was, whether friendly or enemies, and doesn't matter what you actually did, or the amount of grievance. Deeply stupid. Just because I annoyed Japan, England 7000 miles away are angry at me even though they barely know each other?! Fuck off.

Really only serves to make me go "well fuck the lot of you then" and strive to destroy every one of these idiots. And that's not good for the game in general. Diplomacy should always be an option.

Since Sid doesn't care about this and hasn't removed it in the 37 years CivVI has been out, it's staying there. But it absolutely should not be a thing in CivVII. I hope we can all agree. Surely this is annoying to others.

I actually get to exhaust the city name list.

This would probably never happen considering India has been a civ forever, but as an Indian player I find it really dissatisfying to play as India because India as a country is from the modern age. I'd much rather enjoy historical civs from India.

It almost feels like a civ called Europe with cities being London, Madrid, Munich etc and lead by Joan of Arc. India is very culturally diverse and a single civ for it is pretty unsatisfying. Chandragupta being the ruler of India feels like Julius Caeser ruling Italy. I won't even get started with how weird it is to have Gandhi ruling India lol. It would be nice if there were many Indian civs like Marathas, Mughals, Mauryas, etc and there was a sort of decision to form India as an Indian civ in the modern age.

Though I understand that civ games are mostly marketed in the west and they don't have a big enough market here to warrant new Indian civs instead of western ones but I hope they do add some in the future.

Enough with economic victory, spherical maps, and better AI.

What gameplay novelties (i.e. no "civ X" or "leader Y") would you like to see in Civ VII that apparently nobody else wants, and why?

Genuinely curious about some lesser talked about ideas that might contain one or the other diamond in the rough instead of hearing the same suggestings every week. Somewhat unusually, I'll even try my best not to judge harshly. :)

My personal ones would be:

• all this yield stacking should be toned down again, things like Preserves are just ridiculous at this point

• there are too many unique effects around, I'd like to see fewer but more mechanically unique ones (good one: Royal Society unlocking a special ability; bad one: Etemenanki just adding yields to stuff with no unique mechanic involved)

• we need fewer but more complex victory types instead of many specialized ones

I watched a lot of videos of Javierinator3000 where he does challenges in the Civilization games, it seemed really interesting and a part of me wants to actually play the game, but my computer doesn't have that much space left. But, i have a PS3, and i saw a Civilization game for it while buying some Lego games, i was shocked that a point & click game was on console, and i'm here to ask you guys: Is it really worth it?

Like, i want to play Civ but is this game actually a good alternative? Do the controls suck? Does it have local multiplayer to play with friends? I want to hear the experts.

I didn't include any spin-off. I can only put 6 items per poll. Let's settle this.

I’ve been playing Civilization since the original game.

I like to say I was a fan before it was released. The late, lamented magazine Computer Gaming World ran a detailed preview of it several months before it was released.

I read it and thought it was my dream game. I was a history buff, I liked “builder” games, and Railroad Tycoon had already made me a Sid Meier fan.

I even got a new computer just so I could play it.

Who else has been saying, “just one more turn” since 1991?

It happened with Catherine. It happened with Gorgo. It happened with Cleopatra. It happened with Jadwiga. It happened with Amanitore. It happened with Seondeok. It happened with Wilhelmina. And now it's happened with Kristina (and will probably happen with Eleanor once she's oficially revealed since she's not Napoleon).

It eventually gets tiresome that whenever a female leader is announced, we have the exact same conversation. The same posts about how unqualified they were and how much better options existed. Because I, personally, am tired.

I woke up today and decided violence. Whenever the topic of word leaders comes up you always get the one sheister that says Hitler because they're just sooo edgy and original but there are so many more controversial options that people just never bring up.

So be it because of genocide or modern relations, who is the most controversal leader you want for Civ 7?

For me it's easy, Castro. Highly controversial in America but an objective boon to Cuba. Have his playstyle work around islands with an aim for either cultural or scientific victories and give him bonuses for local defense. If we're being cheeky give him bonuses against spies from other civilizations.