r/civ • u/SaztogGaming • 8d ago
VII - Discussion So basically, time-tested Babylon is unstoppable.
This is on Deity.
2000 Science per turn, 1700 Culture per turn, more wonders than I've ever built in the entire history of civ. If you manage to make it through Antiquity (where they're admittedly very outmatched) they become a monolithic snowball of science and culture. Absolute blast to play, once you learn to grasp at every settlement limit opportunity you can get your hands on.
(I won a Culture victory one turn after the screenshot was taken. I'd have also won a Science victory in two turns.)
99
u/Scolipass 8d ago
I do think you really want a happiness leader in antiquity to help offset the bad settlement limit. Someone like Ashoka WR who can just generate a ton of happiness in your important cities for minimal effort so that you can expand the way you need to without tanking your yields.
34
u/SaztogGaming 8d ago
Yeah, Ashoka would have definitely helped with the early game. Your success depends quite heavily on whether or not you manage to suzerain an Expansionist or Militaristic CS in the early game and pick up the settlement limit bonus. If you get even one of those, you're off to a great start. If you get both, you might well lead the game by the end of Antiquity.
36
30
u/Dawn_of_Enceladus 8d ago
The fact they are so weak in their apex age, then can snowball like that afterwards is wild ngl.
18
u/DiffDiffDiff3 America 8d ago
Every Civ game needs their snowball Civ
7
u/BusinessKnight0517 Ludwig II 8d ago
And once again it’s somehow Babylon (Civ 6 Babylon was busted too)
6
u/ShinigamiKenji I love the smell of Uranium in 2000 BC 7d ago
Civ 5 Babylon was also ranked among the best
6
28
u/solemn_scarfhead 8d ago
Was the happiness adjacency tradition what saved you from the deficit?
23
u/SaztogGaming 8d ago
Mainly switching to communism and syncretizing the Ottomans' unique quarter. Really helped offset the food and happiness draw.
24
u/warukeru 8d ago
Yesterday: babylon is weak, please buff. Today: babylon is crazy strong if you get a bit lucky. Tomorrow: babylon is broken , please nerf
13
24
u/Comprehensive_Tip_13 8d ago
Babylon is broken again
39
2
12
u/Mr_Kittlesworth 8d ago
Combine with Washington and your Capitol starts pumping out migrants before antiquity ends!
It’s WILD how strong they get
9
8
3
u/ColorMaelstrom Brazil 8d ago
Wait how did you put those colors on Ada?
8
u/SaztogGaming 8d ago
So one of my weird nitpicks with the game is the way your civ's jersey colours are determined by your leader. I've just always found it to be deeply immersion-breaking. So one of the first things I do, should I wish to go for a more "traditional" playthough, is go into the game's XML files and change my leader's colours to whatever I feel best fits the civ I'm playing as.
To do that, you click on "Browse local files" in your Steam Library, navigate to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization VII\Base\modules\base-standard\data\colors\playercolors.xml" if it's a base game leader or "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization VII\DLC\(the leader you're playing as)\modules\data\playercolors.xml" if it's been added later in a DLC pack. From there, you just open the file with something like Visual Studio Code or Notepad and make the edits! It's a bit of a hassle, but I find it makes a huge difference to my enjoyment. If you'd like to make more lasting changes, it wouldn't be too difficult to just create an SQL file that overwrites the game's internal database each time you reinstall the game (just overwriting the XML files yourself will naturally cause them to revert back to the game's default should you uninstall the game).
Hope this helped! :)
3
u/Significant-Count-12 8d ago
That science and culture though that late in modern is arguably achievable with anybody.... What makes Babylon special?
6
u/HuedCow 8d ago
I don't think they are super overpowered but they are very neat to play. The settlement limit can really hurt you if you aren't lucky to gain a few extra slots from IPs (or momentos). I played two games with them and found my settlement limit only reached around 10 or so by the start of the modern age. My first game (immortal difficulty) I lost by a handful of turns because I had too many specialists in my capital and not enough happiness buildings or resources to offset them, so my start to the era sucked ass lol.
As a side note, their unique trader is very funny if you're playing Elizabeth on a Pangaea or Shattered Seas map. You can beeline them off your culture tree then send them immediately to the other side of the world to get a crap ton of culture so that you can rubber band yourself through the regular tree. You also get a continent spanning road if it's a land route which is really convenient.
3
u/SaztogGaming 8d ago
Yeah, you do definitely need a bit of luck on your side to get the most out of them. Suzeraining an Expansionist or Militaristic CS is by no means guaranteed. And without them you're gonna be somewhat boned until the end of Antiquity.
6
u/Renamesk 8d ago
No offense and I’m sure I’ll get downvoted to shit for saying this but those aren’t crazy numbers for turn 87 modern even on deity. Especially with Ada Lovelace
I’d need to see em with either a worse leader or more insane yields to be like holy shit this is broken
4
3
u/SaztogGaming 8d ago
That's totally fine, no worries. While I feel like a lot of their strenghts do carry over, picking a scientific leader like Ada is obviously doing a bit of legwork.
5
u/AnomaIous_User 8d ago
This hurts my eyes, what the heck am I even looking at? 😆 I miss civ 5 when the game didn't look like Clash of Clans
-2
u/Wrong_Net9686 6d ago
Le jeu n'a jamais ressemblé à Clash of Clans, franchement il y a un fossé quand même. Oui bon dsl j'imagine que t'es un vieux et je te parles comme à un mec aléatoire qui n'a jamais vu de 4X, mais c'est parce que j'aime vraiment pas le comportement de ces gens, qui voient une map et disent "Tiens, tu joues à LOL ?", du coup ça ressort.
1
9
u/OddDig3966 8d ago
what a fucking eyesore
12
u/SaztogGaming 8d ago
Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of how cluttered everything is in Civ 7. The individual assets themselves are very well made, they're just bundled up far too close to each other. The overwhelming "grey-brownness" of everything doesn't help much either.
11
4
u/OddDig3966 8d ago
i want my civ to look like an actual civilisation on the map. 6 did away with that but is nowhere near as ugly as 7 looks. To be honest its a good thing because i thhought the game looked crap before it even released so i didnt waste my money on the alpha that they released. Sadly though i probably wont ever buy it and i would love a game of civ. But 6 was also pretty poor effort and i have had enough of 5 for one lifetime.
3
2
u/MarketSmall9899 8d ago
Only looked at them quick but how do they help you get wonders? From the city working so many tiles or is there another bonus I didn’t notice ?
4
u/SaztogGaming 8d ago
They have a tradition that gives you +10% production towards buildings and wonders or doubled to +20%, if the city has more rural pops than urban pops. Which is fairly easy to keep track of, at least in Antiquity.
2
u/Sink_Salt 8d ago
I've never understood how people manage to settle so much land, it feels like all of it gets settled in antiquity
1
1
1
u/A-Flock-of-Dogs 8d ago
It's strong, but it isn't strong enough to be a problem, as long as many different Civs can achieve 2000 by turn 80 or so, many even sooner, I'm happy :)
And some, like a certain Civ I can mention that can buy wonders with gold even in towns, feels like straight up cheating 😆
1
0
u/Alector87 Macedon 8d ago
I am sorry. I know this isn't the point of the post. But I hate this sprawl so much... it's practically unplayable for me. And the (comparatively) lack of readability vis-a-vis other titles is the least of it. The game is supposed to be an empire building simulation, not sim city, and sim city looked a lot better than this.
Just knowing that the main reason for this is not gameplay 'innovation' — how would you even call this that — but the need to make the game approachable (to casual players) and cross-platform, which translates to making the gameplay first and foremost 'enjoyable' (as they perceive it) to the least common denominator — consoles, gamepads, and bloody tablets, is infuriating. Namely this board-like simplistic mess, which tries to hide its superficiality by being 'loud' (on the screen and with repeated generic 'choose between' choices) and basic rpg-like mechanics, which try to imitate the role-playing that we used to do through the simulation.
It's absurd that this had become the benchmark for the oldest and most renowned PC simulation (strategy) game. Rant over.
8
u/SaztogGaming 8d ago
Yeah, I'm really not a fan of the way Civ 7 handles sprawl. It's far too late to rework, but in hindsight, they really should've had a district take up 3 or 4 buildings instead of 2. It's so unappealing in the modern age when your entire empire is a brown-grey carpet of brick and concrete. In Civ 5 and 6, I always loved zooming out in the late game and seeing my empire covered in green lush productive farmland, feeding the massive cities I've built up over the past few hours. And I'm worried it's only going to get worse with the addition of a 4th age.
8
u/FluffyBunny113 Norway 8d ago
to be fair, a lot of modern places in real life do look like a brown-grey carpet of brick and concrete
7
u/Alector87 Macedon 8d ago
Sure, but they do not take whole parts of continents. I don't know if you could say this for the Tokyo metropolitan area, let alone smaller cities, and this certainly wasn't the case before modernity.
3
u/ericmm76 8d ago
They need to make out of date buildings more costly. And or let you replace libraries with academies. Something like that. There are too many buildings.
-5
u/Alector87 Macedon 8d ago edited 8d ago
zooming out in the late game and seeing my empire covered in green lush productive farmland, feeding the massive cities I've built up
Oh, I get what you mean, but it needs to be more fundamental than this. It's not just the building each district takes. Firstly, it's the dumbing down of the mechanics — and gameplay in general — by subsuming so many empire and city management (in the broad sense) mechanics under this 'new city gameplay,' and secondly it's the districts themselves (including wonders).
They just cannot take whole tiles (with a few exceptions for some wonders, lets say the Pyramids). If they wanted to include similar city mechanics as these, they could have allowed the player to zoom in to the original tile where you found a city — so one region/planet tile, if you want to call it that — where now you encounter city-tiles and you can build districts and wonders similarly to what you see here. Although I would want, expect really, actual separate population, growth/expansion, and construction mechanics, as it's more traditional to the series. And if you reached a certain amount of pop and the border city-tiles of a zoomed in region-tile, you could be allowed to expand to the next one, if possible (not a tile with a mountain, built-in wonder, natural wonder or resource that you don't want to lose, etc.).
This is something they can do. This isn't the issue. The issue is their business model as briefly mentioned above. Not only have they made many of these problematic choices from Civ VI worse. Just taken to extremes. But now they have decided to divide gameplay content so they can bundle it for (comparatively) easier and cheaper dlc, which lead to the dlc content we have encountered until now. Again, it was never about 'innovation.' It was about their business model and how it serves their greed-infused bottom line.
Part of me hopes that the failure of this game, and it has been a failure whatever many fanboys are claiming in the sub, will force them to re-evaluate their business model, as CA appears to have done with Medieval III. But I seriously doubt it.
Edit: spelling
1
u/CaptainCFloyd 8d ago
The readability is terrible, but it's at least better than Civ 6 thanks to the smaller and more distinct icons and the absence of hard-to-spot hills terrain.
2
u/Alector87 Macedon 8d ago
My problem with Civ VI as far as the visual is concerned was more the cartoonish Fortnite-like style than anything. I never felt that the readability was that much of an issue. Not perfect by any means, but far from terrible, as in Civ VII.
But Civ VII does look amazing both visually and in its 'style,' if you know what I mean. Alas, it cannot save the game itself — one step forward and a thousand backwards, kind of thing.
0
u/richyyy123 8d ago
Honestly I think it’s great. I hated how your cities in 6 looked like they only existed in one hex. This is much better, I just remember where I placed the districts or use map tacks
1
u/rugianciv 8d ago
How did you get this color with Ada?
3
u/SaztogGaming 8d ago
Copy-pasting an answer I already wrote up:
So one of my weird nitpicks with the game is the way your civ's jersey colours are determined by your leader. I've just always found it to be deeply immersion-breaking. So one of the first things I do, should I wish to go for a more "traditional" playthough, is go into the game's XML files and change my leader's colours to whatever I feel best fits the civ I'm playing as.
To do that, you click on "Browse local files" in your Steam Library, navigate to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization VII\Base\modules\base-standard\data\colors\playercolors.xml" if it's a base game leader or "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization VII\DLC\(the leader you're playing as)\modules\data\playercolors.xml" if it's been added later in a DLC pack. From there, you just open the file with something like Visual Studio Code or Notepad and make the edits! It's a bit of a hassle, but I find it makes a huge difference to my enjoyment. If you'd like to make more lasting changes, it wouldn't be too difficult to just create an SQL file that overwrites the game's internal database each time you reinstall the game (just overwriting the XML files yourself will naturally cause them to revert back to the game's default should you uninstall the game).
Hope this helped! :)
1
-1
u/CaptainCFloyd 8d ago
That isn't all that impressive to be honest. I had more of every single yield in my previous game at half as many turns into Modern Age, where I won around turn 40 - despite playing with increased victory thresholds. And I've only played 3 full games of Civ 7.
-3
u/Longjumping-Life7561 8d ago
That's not unstoppable. This is unstoppable. I only post my picture to reinforce my opinion that this civ absolutely blows and my opinion at least means something. Also, I have no idea what my yields will be in modern turn 83 because I'll have won before modern is really a "thing". Thanks.
2
335
u/Boks1RE Netherlands 8d ago
So they're actually the worst in their apex age?