Sid Meier's Civilization 7 isn't afraid to take risks

When you’re more than eight entries deep into a franchise, keeping things fresh has to be a challenge. I’ll admit that I was a little curious what Firaxis Games had up its sleeve to make Sid Meier's Civilization 7 feel unique. Now that I have more than 15 hours under my belt that’s no longer a concern.

The first big change players will notice starts the moment you select your leader. In previous games, leaders were tied to civilizations, such as Bismark with Germany, Queen Elizabeth with England, and so on. Now, leaders and civilizations have been split up. For instance, I chose Benjamin Franklin as my leader due to the science bonuses but picked Rome as my civilization due to the militaristic culture. It might seem strange having Benjamin Franklin lead Rome, but separating leaders and civs creates unique opportunities that couldn’t have existed previously. You may also notice that Benjamin Franklin wasn’t the head of state. In Civ 7, there are more leaders that weren’t running their civilizations, but rather had a major influence on it.

Once I got rolling with Benjamin Franklin and Rome things started to feel familiar, although I was rusty since I mostly skipped Civilization 6 and haven’t played more than five hours of Civ since 2016. The early loop is similar, though. You’re founding your capital, exploring the map, meeting new leaders, and trying to get off to the best start possible.

My next big surprise was waiting for me when I founded my second settlement. While your capital is a city, everything you found after that is a town. Civilization 7 allows you to have a mix of cities and towns in your empire, which gives the entire experience much more personality. Cities are bustling machines that are there to push out production and science. Towns don’t have a production queue but instead convert their production into Gold. Gold is used to purchase buildings and units in a town. Towns can also have a specialization, such as farming, trade, mining, or a military outpost. Finally, if you really want you can spend Gold to turn a town into a city, which allows you unprecedented freedom to shape your civilization.

There’s so much happening in Civ 7 that calling it all out in this article would just turn into a giant bullet list, which I’m sure would please veterans of the franchise. However, I’d rather talk about one last feature that changed the way I looked at territory control: navigable rivers.

That’s right, rivers that cut into a continent and connect to inland bodies of water can now be sailed upon, opening up new gameplay opportunities that didn’t exist before. I was able to sail my Cog along a river and inland while attacking a rival civ, bombarding one of their cities that would have been more difficult to reach otherwise. This can also allow you to produce naval units in more than just coastal cities.

Where the wrench gets thrown into things is territory control. One of my cities was inland but built on a river. It could produce naval units, which I had it doing in preparation for a surprise invasion of a faraway civ led by Xerxes. The problem was Isabella owned the portion of the river that spilled out into the ocean. Since I wasn’t ready to fight Isabella, I had to negotiate open borders to sail my ships along the river to the ocean, and then across to Xerxes. Unfortunately, open borders with Isabella ended the moment I attacked Xerxes, stranding one of my ships on the river further inland. Of course, this will have to be rectified in the future through war. In subsequent playthroughs, however, I’ll be much more mindful to control entire rivers to avoid this problem.

There are still a lot of questions to be answered about Civilization 7, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to take a crack at that after only 15 hours. I need to complete several playthroughs with different civilizations and motivations in order to present a qualified opinion. For now, I’m filled with excitement over what I’ve seen so far, but I’m still in the honeymoon phase. If you want a more in-depth look at what Civ 7 brings to the table, you can read my review on Monday, February 3, at 9:00 a.m. ET, or you can watch the one-hour of gameplay embedded in this article where Shacknews EIC, Asif Khan, reacts to an early playthrough.

Bill Lavoy

Managing Editor

Bill, who is also known as Rumpo, is a lifelong gamer and Toronto Maple Leafs fan. He made his mark early in his career through guide writing and a deep understanding of editorial SEO. He enjoys putting in the work to create a great content, be it a wild feature or grinding out an in-depth collectible guide. Tweet him @RumpoPlays if you have a question or comment about one of his articles.