Paul_P Sid Meier's Civilization VII Review

Aug 26, 2025
Civ7 is a disappointment for me. It’s not a strategy game anymore. After 60 hours, I can say that it’s a very boring entry in the series. The main problems for me are: • Strategic resources are no longer “strategic.” I don’t need to search the map to find a good place for a city/town with “Horses,” “Iron,” etc. It doesn’t matter for creating units such as “Horseman” or “Swordsman”; these resources just give a useless +1 Strength and nothing more. This completely removes the incentive to look for them, fight for them, or try to control more of them to become stronger. It used to be fun to deprive your opponent of horses so they couldn’t create cavalry. You had to come up with a military strategy depending on the situation. Now, that is gone. • Many additional resources have been added — and I hate it. Every time I have to manage them, I feel frustrated. Why is there no “auto resource allocation” button? Why can’t I trade them? Why are there so many of them? • Each city/town has a border limit, and it doesn’t increase from one era to another. Why? It’s very annoying to see resources near your city but not have access to them because the city has already reached its border limit. • Building cities/towns is boring too. I expected more opportunities for construction, more depth. For example, it would be great if I could build a bridge across 2–3 hexes to connect the capital with a city on a nearby island. Or create my own Suez Canal, so that other countries would pay me to pass through it — or try to seize it from me. This would create very interesting situations. But now I just play this part of the game like a point-and-click routine. I also want to manage the construction of railways and lay them out the way I want, based on the “situation on the ground.” Yes, I expected Civ7 to be at least a simplified version of a city-building sim. • The Age Transition system is horrible. I don’t like it. I don’t want it. It breaks everything. Wars end abruptly, you lose cities, you lose allies in the form of independent cities — even though you spend a lot of influence on them and sometimes wait a very long time to become allies. There are already so many comments and reviews criticizing this decision, so I think you need to implement a classic mode with consistent research and development (like in Civ6) alongside the new transition system for those who enjoy it. • I really want to see real verticality in the game: for the mountains to be higher, for there to be a difference in the height of the sea and the ocean, for it to be possible to build underground and in the sky. I want an airship and hot air balloons! • I liked the new Army Commanders and their features. • I like the graphics. • The UI and UX are horrible. Many of the ideas and features from Civ6 are gone. • I don’t like hearing “Hmm” from leaders. • I don’t like that I can’t get ahead as a civilization because the transition of eras just averages everyone out. You are always at roughly the same level as everyone else throughout the game. Even now in the real world there are clear differences between countries both economically and militarily. • I also don’t like how the tasks for reaching the golden era are designed now. Conclusion: I was really looking forward to this part of the game, but when it came out, I was disappointed. In my opinion, it’s a big step back in terms of ideas, gameplay possibilities, and the Civilization series itself, which has its own history and unique features. I really hope the developers will improve it, but I understand that this may take a long time — maybe another year or two. So… I will wait for a big update.
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