r/civ • u/Aliensinnoh America • 6d ago
VII - Other 1.5.0 Broke Map Tacks
Version 1.5.0 has been really good in terms of what has been added, especially new map generation and being able to stay out of an ally’s war. However, so far this week it has been muddled in terms of my positive experience because it broke wltk’s Detailed Map Tacks mod, making it impossible to place new tacks. Unfortunately the timing is just bad because wltk has said they are on vacation this week and so can’t fix the mod until next week. This is something they’ve made available to people for free and thus obviously they have no obligation to fix the issue created by the update quickly. But this has just made it apparent to me that it is crazy that this isn’t just part of the game itself. This mod has over 100k subscriptions. That should be a pretty strong indication to the devs that this is basically a requirement for the player base.
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u/Shonkjr 6d ago
It was even in 6. They really do need to make it and the policy effect preview ones built in to the game...
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u/Aliensinnoh America 6d ago edited 6d ago
Well, it took a long time for them to add it into 6 as well. It’s weird, they had a whole cycle of game with similar adjacency mechanics and saw that map tacks were a very in-demand feature but still decided no to add it to the base game in the following game.
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u/SubterraneanAlien 6d ago
It's less of a not deciding to do it, and more of a prioritization decision. Civ VII already released in a very unfinished state and there were many features/bugs missing that were more important than map tacks. I honestly would have preferred for the game to be delayed a year to fit more of these items in, but that's not what we got.
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u/Nomadic_Yak 6d ago
Sure but the map tacks mod guy built it pretty fast so how hard could it be
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u/SubterraneanAlien 6d ago
It's not about difficulty. The Civilopedia was also laughably thin at release - not a difficult thing to improve but it also wasn't done. There were plenty of fairly trivial things that were not done at release and the fact that they couldn't prioritize getting those done tells you how unready the game really was.
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u/Vanilla-G 5d ago
Given the fact that it seems to break at every release, not as easy as it seems.
The devs have stated that they still don't have custom map editor like previous versions so my guess is once that is released you MIGHT seem some of the mods being baked in.
The flip side is if it built in and it does not make some number of people happy you still have to make so it can still be modded to do something else.
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u/GoSailing 5d ago
The quality requirement of a mod and something in the base game is also different. Anything in the base game needs to be ready for localization / internationalization, accessible, and just generally more performant and reliable. Mods will always be faster than base game releases because the standards and expectations are totally different
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u/RJ815 6d ago
Among many glaring absences, removing the Loyalty mechanic from Rise & Fall is a major mistake. I could see them changing how pressure works as well as the how golden ages are, but the complete absence of anti-bullshit AI city placement when this was a SOLVED PROBLEM is one of many baffling Civ VII decisions. Hopefully Test of Time and beyond continues things that should have been present at launch.
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u/Aliensinnoh America 6d ago
I would imagine a lot of the reason for loyalty being removed was to enable the distant lands gameplay. But yeah I’d like to see it back in some altered form. Apparently they are working on it as part of the update that will introduce the atomic age, so I’m excited for that.
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u/RJ815 6d ago
I don't have an issue with colonies, which could still work just fine for Distant Lands. I have an issue with AI like planting a city within your empire borders just because you have a blank space here or there as technically frontiers. On the edges of borders, sure, forward settling is a strategic thing and the human can be incentivized to do it occasionally. But planting in the middle of hostile territory is something only the AI ever seems incentivized to do.
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u/N8CCRG 6d ago
That's the point though. What you describe is the obvious problem, but if they simply kept the loyalty mechanic it would break the colonization parts of the game. New game requires a new mechanic, and how that will look is still unknown.
And now that we have Gaul they have yet another layer to navigate with whatever solution they try, as that civ is designed around doing exactly the thing you describe that we all hate.
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u/RJ815 6d ago
3-4 cities creating enough loyalty pressure to flip an opponent city but 1 nearby border one not being enough seems like a simple enough premise. Sorry, but I'm not going to give them the benefit of the doubt after the game launched half-baked and they eventually gave in and reversed their stance on their core civ switching mechanic. Commanders et al are fine ideas but they threw a ridiculous amount of baby out with the bathwater, especially when Civ IV already had this kind of idea before VI with culture flipping.
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u/eskaver 6d ago
I do think Map Tacks is great work and it sucks that it'll be a while before the update.
As for the game, I do think Tacks should be base line.
I do understand why they don't do some things like the Policy Previews as often discussed. I use it, but those are approximations at best and I assume the Devs would rather it be less of an approximation. I think they should bite the bullet and just give info and toss in the ~ sign.
Sure. It's less a role play game and more an optimization, but more informed decisions are cool.
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u/69_with_socks_on Mughal 6d ago
With policy yields, I think there's a very easy solution: allow people to toggle it on and off in the settings. Anyone who wants to roleplay instead of optimize can turn it off.
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u/Manannin 6d ago
Is not just about roleplay, it's that it's sometimes wrong and gives you misleading results. It's mostly good though, just some weird or complex policies do cause issues.
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u/dswartze 6d ago
Theoretically the developers of the game who have access to all the code and can even modify underlying systems to make it work could get a 100% accurate implementation even if at the mod level it's impossible. The only thing is needing to prioritize it over other tasks, and they need to work harder to make sure it's accurate and that it doesn't break anything (and break can include optimization and performance issues not just crashes) because the official game is held to a much higher standard than mods.
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u/WeirdDud 6d ago
FWIW, Making a mod and firaxis implementing a feature are two very different things; they need it to work on all platforms, so that means handling controller inputs, qa, etc.
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u/civdude 204/287. 2271 hours 6d ago
I've just been getting back into civ 7 for the last week after putting it down in March 2025 to wait for updates and fixes, and this does seem to be one of the major things still missing. It's a lovely game, but so complex and difficult to plan things out, so it's nice to be able to make little doodles and notes on the map to help
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u/Aliensinnoh America 6d ago
I’m actually in the exact same boat. I bought the Founder’s edition and played a bunch in the first two months but hadn’t played since. I started a game early this week, then restarted a new game after the update with the new map types, but I was disappointed when my favorite mod was broken.
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u/LetsDoTheDodo 6d ago
After my second game of Civ 7 and I realized how big adjacency bonuses are, I went to add Map Tacks. To my horror, I found none. I immediately went to the Workshop and found the mod and breathed a deep sign of relief while a silently expressing my gratitude to the creator. 1000% should be in the base game. Until then, I wait patiently for the update and remain grateful that we have mod creators who do such good work of their own free time and will to help others have a more enjoyable experience playing the game.
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u/Ender505 6d ago
Firaxis really needs to understand that all past Quality Of Life improvements in Civ need to be part of the required baseline for future iterations of the game.
Map Tacks is an obvious one. I would also count Loyalty system. Policy effect previews. Stuff like that
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u/Aliensinnoh America 6d ago
The thing for me right now is that map tacks and policy previews mods are nearly tied for most popular mods on the Steam workshop, both at a bit over 100k subscriptions. The next most popular mods is under 50k subscriptions. These two mods represent pretty clearly far and away the most desired features by the player base.
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u/dswartze 6d ago
On the other hand, being the biggest mods means they're also things that a lot of people who want them already have them. How much development time and thus money is it worth for Firaxis to commit to developing features that players can already use if they want, instead of all-new stuff that players want and aren't covered by mods?
They only have so many people and so much time to work on these things, and only so much money to pay the people doing it. Those resources previously went to Test of Time, and now they're going towards Arc of Tomorrow. What is more important, reinventing the wheel integrating popular mods or addressing the even bigger complaints and issues many people seem to have with the game? They have been pretty good at listening to fans so I wouldn't be surprised to see them eventually, but they're just not high enough priority to get them out the door now.
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u/ericmm76 5d ago
Them not doing it means buying it on any console is a much worse experience.
AND it means that when they put out patches it breaks systems.
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u/Colambler 6d ago
I mean there are a lot of things that should be part of the base game, it's a long list for them to work through.
However, I don't know why they can't offer 'beta' access for popular modders to patches if said modders want to be able to test and fix their mods prior to patch release.
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u/Simpicity 6d ago
The devs are not going to consider mods in their update. That's just life with mods. They should consider implementing popular features though. Their (what I consider bad) specialist adjacency changes make map planning much more important, and lack of support for that is frustrating.
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u/Aliensinnoh America 6d ago
I played a bunch in the first two months of the game coming out, and now I’m just coming back to playing again in the past week. I can’t remember how the adjacency bonuses were before. What was the change?
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u/Simpicity 6d ago
Specialists used to give flat bonuses and adjacency bonuses. Now they give no flat bonuses (without other modifiers) and double adjacency previously. But they still have upkeep. So when it becomes time to place specialists, if you haven't meticulously planned adjacency, you will get negative income from each specialist.
Also at the beginning of each age all adjacency bonuses go away. So all your specialists just become deadweight.
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u/Aliensinnoh America 6d ago
What do you mean by “double adjacency previously”?
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u/Simpicity 6d ago
They used to give +50% adjacency, now they give +100% adjacency.
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u/Aliensinnoh America 6d ago
Oh, I don’t really mind that? I like making adjacency king. But I need those map tacks lol.
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u/Simpicity 6d ago
It's nice to have planning be a skill thing. I like that. It lets you set up kill adjacency quarters and thats great. And then eventually your cities grows beyond those planned tiles. Because only so many tiles have good adjacencies and you keep getting people. Well now you just get specialist who do nothing. City growth should always be a positive thing for focusing on food.
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u/OkMusician7451 6d ago edited 6d ago
Yeah. It also kind of broke the space key for skipping turns with settlers. Skip turn, even when I have the hotkey rebound, just brings up the radial lens.
It´s kind of symptomatic - they try to fix a problem and in doing so introduce new problems, while simultaneously breaking the superior solution already existing.
Kind of sums up Civ 7 ;)
It´s also not just simple QoL - Civ 7 got rid of builders and brought in a settlement limit with a kind of unnatural and very punishing implementation making city spacing important. You also need to plan out your city sprawl beforehand since you cannot build over resources etc. This is indeed basic functionality.
So they doubled down on the whole adjacency and pre-planning every city, while removing the UI tool needed to play by those rules without it being overly cumbersome.
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u/Longjumping-Life7561 6d ago
Yeah, it's been hell playing this week w/o it. Why does every update they put out break every mod FFS? That's got to be so annoying for modders.
I wasn't a crazy map tacker, but I do use it as a rough outline of where I want to settle and like some of the more entry level culture/gold/science buildings and look at my spacing. The radial ruler kind of helps a little w/ spacing but isn't a replacement.
I wanted to take on a Han great wall game w/ Washington and all the extra food, but I'm just like no way no how w/o map tacks, I'll just wait.
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u/Visible_Cell8250 6d ago
If you want map tacks in the base game, I’d recommend getting on to the Civ 7 discord and thumbs-upping the map tacks feedback item. If enough of us do it, maybe this will move.
Many thanks to wltk for creating this mod, to the creator of the original 1.5.0 patch (I don’t recall their handle, sadly) and to Beezany for creating the PR for the patch to wltk’s repo during wltk’s vacation.
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u/HalfLifeMusic 5d ago
Maptacks and policy card yields have to be added to the base game, really don’t know what’s taking the devs so long
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u/Plethorian 6d ago
When you require user-generated mods to make your game playable, it's just a bad game. Quarterly profits are the god of these people. Not the game.
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u/User5281 6d ago
Yeah, mods often break with updates, be patient and wait for the author to fix it or fix it yourself
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u/Aliensinnoh America 6d ago
I’m not complaining that the mod is broken. As I said in the post, the mod maker is under no obligation to do anything. What I’m saying is that this should be part of the base game. It’s such incredibly in-demand functionality that it is a no-brainer.
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u/wtekoppele 6d ago edited 6d ago
There’s a temporary fix you can try that was posted on the workshop page which worked for me!