Name: TOP 10 BIG CHANGES IN CIVILIZATION 7 - Civ 6 VS Civ 7
Uploaded: 2025-02-12T14:22:02.000Z
Duration: 15 min 26 s
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Sid Meier's went to town introducing changes to Civilization VII.

In this video I'm going to break down 10 big differences, some obvious, some more subtle.

Beginning with the first thing that'll strike you in a game, perhaps beyond the art style, it's bye-bye barbarians.

For both barbarians and city-states have changed, and in essence kind of merged into one category, now referred to as independents, independent nations, peoples, they operate essentially like city-states from before, however, they have some different interactions with some other new features, like ages in the game, and they also have more of an independent diplomacy to them, using a yield, we'll talk about later, influence you can befriend them, then use that influence to recruit units from them, levies, so on and so forth.

They may start with a positive relationship with you, they may also start at war with you, furious with you, this is essentially how Civilization VII is able to merge the barbarians, their encampments, with the old city-states, and create the kind of best of both worlds option, as you move through the game's ages, you may run into the more aggressive city-state, independents in particular, as they do pop up at the first crisis event, at the end of the game's first age, which actually probably works as a wonderful transition to move us through to the second big difference, three ages per game, or if you wish, you could just play with one, starting in the third age, beginning with the antiquity age, this will make up the early game, and then carry you through into the age of exploration, the second period in the game, about open sea exploring, finding those new lands, and perhaps conquering them as you go, finally, the third age, bundling all of the modern world into one from the industrial era onwards, roughly, it's the modern age, the way that Civilization VII handles these, from my impressions from playing it early, again, thanks to 2K who flew me out to get some hands-on experience with Civilization VII early, is that they are not as disruptive as the ages in, say, Millenia, or Humankind.

Toward the end of an age, in Civilization VII, again, there are only three, you'll face a crisis event, the first one, as I've already mentioned, a whole load of independent cities pop up, some of them will be your enemy, others you might be able to befriend, the point is, the world is in crisis, breaking away, splintering apart, and it's up to you to not just handle the negative policy cards that come with that, but also, of course, to handle the challenges it presents on the map, it's a double whammy every time you change ages, the negative crisis events that you'll deal with, the policy cards, as well as the world around you.

The ages specifically, and the transitions in between them of course, only occur twice, as you start in the antiquity age, and the game will finish at the end of a modern one, and those transitions are important, not just for the benefits they'll provide you, depending on how well you've done, but also for our third, and really probably the most controversial entry on the list, it's the dynamic civilizations, the changing of civs in Civ VII, again a new mechanic for civilization, though not a new one in the genre, here you can see their animation playing out, your three decision points, though I would again reiterate that the first one is just starting a game, so really it's only changing twice.

The developers have in recent times tried to skew it, or push us towards looking at those historical ones, in this case Songhai unlocked by playing Egypt in the first age.

The game also pushes some more player-dependent options, like Mongolia here, where you are required to have access to three different horse resources, finally when you move through to the modern age, they hint at the fact that all other civilizations can be paired with your leader.

The historical options, the historical pairings, are generally pushed by the game, they make by far and away the most sense, they have the most obvious synergies, synergies with what of course?

Well, the leaders, something I haven't talked about yet, and while they are different from previous civ games, even Civilization VI, arguably the leaders are stronger now, they also have improvements that you can tack onto them as the game moves through, and crucially now of course they hold the role of being the piece that remains consistent throughout the entire game, your leader will not change, but your civilization of course will.

You can see that the game hints towards the historical pairings at the leader select and then civ select screen, they do make the most sense, and generally my impression is that the game will try and lead you toward those options, however, as you can see, it's not required, you can play as the Egyptian leader of a Roman civilization, totally an option for you, my other understanding is that it won't necessarily be the default option for AI, it may tend to lean towards history, though of course we'll have to wait and see on that one.

Let's move through to number four, a smaller point but one not to be overlooked, navigable rivers have been introduced in Civilization VII, the question then becomes how, for those who don't know, this means that we can navigate through rivers, rivers become tiles, though not quite, you can see from this actual gameplay that the river is maybe making up about half of the tile, you can see in the slow motion replay that the unit is however able to sail across, or up maybe in this case, the river, sailing up a river, a little bit unusual, the point here is that they are navigable, and some civilizations will lean into this as well, for example, the traditionally Egyptian leader, Hatshepsut, Hatshepsut, Hatshepsut, Ok, Hatshepsut is, for example, great at building wonders alongside cities that are adjacent to navigable rivers, so it's not just transportation of units, but also many of the leaders and civs will lean into this new mechanic, speaking of new mechanics, let's talk about another new mechanic to Civ VII, big towns, big money, and they certainly are money makers, what exactly, well they're kind of like satellite cities, built and connected to your existing cities, or I believe what happens when you conquer a city, towns are wonderful for making money and connecting resources, some of the leaders, as you've seen, will lean into them even further, adding additional benefits to building or capturing more towns, I find building them early and often, simply connecting resources on the map is the way to go, the towns themselves will connect resources generally by way of money, speeding it into the nearest city, or connected city I should say, they'll also obviously bring those key resources on the map, the things that you're actually building on, improving, and that are providing happiness, which we'll touch on in a moment, they'll bring those back for distribution too, so you might place them tactically, defensively, or just for the land grab.

The next item, it's another goodbye, we wave a sad goodbye to builders in Civilization VII who don't make a return, while many units receive unit functions in the form of, say, the scout having a new lookout ability, the commanders we'll touch on in a moment, builders don't receive a unit at all, instead you'll be managing the improvements from inside of your city, roads built automatically connecting your cities and towns, and basically Civilization VII is wrapping it all into the city management screen, I found it's not terrible, though taking the builders away does absolutely remove another iconic part of the Civilization experience.

Building out, expanding the city can happen within and on tiles that need to be improved, like this date farm there.

Alternatively, you can also layer on top of an existing city district, particularly the urban district, where you can also bring back specialists, additional populations, instead of growing a city or town out, grabbing a new resource or a new tile, you can build up, adding additional buildings and again, specialists to a tile.

This is a big change, and it's not one that should be overlooked, bye bye builders, however some other things of course make an introduction into the early game, as a quick bonus one here, while you may lose builders, the events, which were, you know, goody huts, tribal huts, maybe it revealed a portion of the map before, well, these things have been upgraded, not just providing you with these kind of opportunity costs, trade-off decisions, that are much more impactful, generally providing a pretty good amount of yield, they can also lead to greater things, what I would refer to as questlines, missions, challenges, for you to dig into and if you're successful, you might earn even more yield, perhaps points towards your legacy pathway, or upgrading a future age.

Speaking of upgrading, command and control kind of players will also see a lot of upgrades to combat, in particular, I think the most significant one is not the reanimated unit artwork, the closer battles, perhaps even slightly more realistic ones, no no no, it is instead the introduction of commanders, three different types, here we're looking at age 1, the land-based army commander, with its wonderful effect of packing up all nearby units and bundling them onto one tile, that you can freely march around with, this obviously reduces a lot of micromanagement, in the same way that removing the builder removed micromanagement, however it also adds an extra layer of strategy, I've talked about this in some of my other passive 7 breakdown videos, so I'm going to pause talking about the commanders specifically there, but just to mention one more crucial part, it's not just removing the micromanagement, if you think about how this plays out not just in one turn, one conflict, but over many many many conflicts, you are really scaling up here, your ability to just get crap done, furthermore, these dudes can be buffed and enhanced, so different commanders can handle different roles within an army, one perhaps boosting their strength, just their charred dead assault strength, the other may be more about logistics, packing up quickly, deploying quickly, able to deploy and attack in a turn, catch an enemy by surprise, the levelling up also creates a greater attachment to these units, they're expensive to build, at least 5 times as much as a normal one, and worth a look, but maybe not quite as influential overall as the new influential yields, while not brand new, sometimes repackaged versions of old ones from other games, or previous lift games, you can see them all up in the top left, from left to right we've got gold, crucially, influence, then science, culture, another biggie, happiness, and finally the one out of three at the end is city cap, this of course at the beginning of a game, the kind of base stuff you're dealing with, influence which can be generated from a whole load of things, from actions, events, buildings, leaderships, you name it, is often levied like this, supporting a war, or engaging in some kind of diplomatic action, a cultural exchange, maybe supporting a foreign power in a foreign war, it also gets a little bit more nefarious than that, not just handling the kind of nice to have diplomatic actions, the very early diplomatic actions, the very first one, but also those kind of sanctions, the more espionage style, hinder the opponent, or maybe just build up some support for a war, right, denounce them, all of it comes with an influence, influence is also used to convert towns into cities, and potentially many other actions within the game too, it should not be overlooked, happiness, by the way, largely integrated with cities, city development, buildings, that kind of thing, your religion may also play a significant role here, this one is kind of your growth mechanic, right, get the resources, get the extra happiness buffs from buildings, and try and balance that out against your growth, similar but not identical to older versions, like maybe a Civ V version upgraded.

Next up, the penultimate addition, Eureka Who, this one perhaps easier to miss, not as big of a change as Civilizations changing, but take a look at the tech tree and you'll notice that if you think back to Civ VI, there's something really significant missing in Civ VII, and that's the Eureka, missing from the technology and civics tree, the Eureka bonus is gone, it may return in certain shapes or forms, later ages, certain civilizations potentially, but from the base, from the beginning, that puppy is no longer, so the strategy of chaining down, trying to hit certain events, not as important now in Civilization VII.

And finally, to something that is very important in Civilization VII, the legacy pathways, the kind of quests and missions that will carry you through the ages, these things will give you more age points, allowing you to potentially advance the age faster, sooner, but also to benefit yourself through the potentially golden age benefits that might come through the legacy pathways.

They also provide, as you'll see in just a moment, a nice structure to each age, legacy pathways providing an overall goal within four categories, science, culture, military and economy, leading you through individual ages, and then on the alternate tab, leading you towards victory.

These not only kind of set the different pathways that you can take, provide you with a little bit of a gentle nudge in the right direction, but they also help you really focus in on the kind of empire that you want to be, right, because with all of the greater flexibility potentially that we've talked about in this video, with the changing of civs, with the choosing a leader and that staying, but loads of skill trees and pathways to go down, this is the final factor in kind of pulling all of that together, it gives you the structure that you need, it helps relate your civilization benefits and bonuses toward the ultimate victory pathways.

Thank you very much for joining me in these ten big differences that have been introduced in Civilization VII, I have so enjoyed this early coverage of Civ VII, there may not be a lot more right now, but you can bet your backside I'll be covering all of the updates and announcements moving forward, so make sure you subscribe for those, and I'll see you next time.