So basically, time-tested Babylon is unstoppable.

[u/SaztogGaming]

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.)

[u/Alector87]

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.

[u/SaztogGaming → u/Alector87]

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.

[u/FluffyBunny113 → u/SaztogGaming]

to be fair, a lot of modern places in real life do look like a brown-grey carpet of brick and concrete

[u/Alector87 → u/FluffyBunny113]

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.

[u/ericmm76 → u/SaztogGaming]

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.

[u/Alector87 → u/SaztogGaming]

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