The opening segment of Firaxis’ major Civilization 7 showcase fits the studio’s style perfectly: Ed Beach, the game’s lead designer, delivers a rapid, layered walkthrough of the historical eras that shape the City of London. Beach is also one of the uncommon cases where a lead designer stays at the helm across several releases—he steered Civ 6 before Civ 7, and his involvement with the franchise goes back even further. Originally trained as a physicist before moving into game development, Beach helped support the launch of the Hubble telescope, a key ingredient in Civ 6’s scientific victory. He’s also, as was quickly clear, a devoted fan of history.
Addressing a packed room of journalists eager for the first tangible information about the next chapter, Beach instead pulls up a London map from the Roman era, taken from Encyclopaedia Britannica. With the river’s importance in the ancient settlement’s positioning in view, he reflects on how the Ludgate—situated along the community’s western wall—may have gotten its name. “We’re uncertain about its origin. We believe it could be named Ludgate after a Welsh king known to have resided in that area, King Lud.”
From there, Beach shifts the focus to the medieval period, pointing out that a river segment that once lay outside the Ludgate has since been reshaped so it now sits within the city limits. “They’ve actually rerouted the Fleet River, creating a rather interesting moat around their medieval prison…” After that, a new slide shows the factories and railway lines that quickly sprang up in the 19th century. As Victorian Britain pushed for more space to work with, the river-moat was ultimately covered over completely. “It’s not even visible anymore, as they needed to accommodate the demands of the Industrial Revolution.”
There’s a clear reason for this, beyond the fun of revisiting the kind of history lessons you get in primary school—and me making my own tea-stained “Roman maps” for schoolwork. After finishing Civ 6 and running a standard post-mortem, Firaxis ran into a major issue, Beach said. “We were exceedingly self-critical in reviewing Civ 6, regardless of its sales success or community feedback,” he noted in a follow-up discussion. “I was taken aback by how self-critical the design team was about dissecting aspects they weren’t fond of.”
What did they see as the core problem? Matches could drag on for too long, without giving players real opportunities to step away naturally before getting pulled back in. Beach explained that this left many people so worn out by long sessions that they never make it to the finish. To find a remedy, Beach looked to history and recalled a familiar line: “history is constructed in layers.”
That idea underpins a brand-new—undoubtedly contentious—mechanic in Civilization 7 called Ages. Beach told me this system is both the biggest change and the one that “required the most effort,” because it amounts to “a fundamental structural shift” in how the game works. What they’re calling campaigns are now split into three separate periods: the antiquity age, exploration age, and modern age. Each age will include what was only described loosely as “unique content and gameplay,” with the goal of highlighting the most compelling aspects of that timeframe. “It’s akin to evolving from trying to tell a single, exceedingly lengthy story with a definitive conclusion, to something more like The Lord of the Rings, where we achieve three conclusions that are all interconnected,” Beach added.
This shift is a big deal, with knock-on effects for two systems from Civ 6. Every civilization will move into the next age at the same time, following the same general idea as the golden ages and dark ages structure from the Rise and Fall expansion. At the same time, scientific and cultural progress from the two returning technology trees will now be tied to this shared age movement, which means some adjustments are required. Those two trees have been reorganized: during a given age, you can advance a certain distance until you hit a barrier. After that, you can keep researching ‘future tech’ for a bonus, but only until all civilizations progress together. Advancement through each age is tracked with a percentage meter in the top-left corner—and as you approach the end of each era, a crisis takes shape.
Unfortunately, the specifics of how those crises will play out weren’t clearly defined (even after my best attempt to power through a roughly three-hour session to get to the end of the era, it just wasn’t in reach). Firaxis did share some perspective on how the transitions between ages will work. Each civilization will have four legacy paths—another new feature connected to the Ages system—sorted into science, economy, culture, and military. Reaching milestones in each category, such as unlocking certain technologies or amassing enough resources, will reward you with bonuses you can carry into the following age.
Could this new structure affect how freely players can respond and adjust in the moment? Was that something Firaxis considered? “It has,” Beach replied. “We’ve focus-tested this with numerous individuals and received that precise feedback.”
The studio’s intention has been to “loosen things up,” giving players room to take advantage of choices, which Beach described as “opportunities to take advantage of — but nothing that constrains your gameplay too heavily.” Rather than steering players down one prescribed route, the goal is to make every age feel like a “checkpoint” inside the larger game. “The game’s state will save off and then return, having been reset in a subtle manner, but we aim to avoid being so heavy-handed that it restricts players too much.”
“I would argue it opens up many more possibilities,” added Andrew Frederiksen, the long-standing lead producer of Civilization 7, pointing to the decisions available when each age ends. “In previous Civ games, it was akin to one marathon, as we discussed, without checkpoints, and it wasn’t difficult to find yourself in a position where your only options for victory were either A or B.”
This update arrives alongside another meaningful change in Civ 7: civilizations and their leaders are no longer directly linked to one another. Firaxis has reportedly been “trialing” this idea for some time, says Beach, but splitting each match into ages is what made it happen. When you move from one age to the next, you’ll now be able to choose which civilization to take up. As an example, Hatshepsut—the real-world Pharaoh of Egypt—was referenced. At the start of a game, you’ll see a handful of suggested picks for your chosen leader: Hatshepsut standing in for Egypt, as well as Aksum, a less widely known but powerful trading state from the same region, plus any extra option you might prefer. Jumping to the next age will automatically open Songhai, as long as you selected Egypt, while other civilizations can also appear depending on what you do during the run—for instance, Mongolia becomes available after you obtain three resources tied to horses.
It’s hard to fully appreciate what these selections mean without personally stepping through an age change. Even so, a pressing question is how it influences the immersive, role-playing side of choosing a starting civilization and leader—then living out that identity, whether you’re taking on the role of conqueror Genghis Khan or embracing the mindset of Philip II—until you ultimately win or lose. That was one of the challenges in Amplitude’s Humankind, a strong contender to the Civilization series that used a comparable mechanic but faded after its 2021 release.
On the other hand, Firaxis may contend that this added flexibility lets you shift your “role” as you progress, while still giving you the chance to stick with a civilization as it grows—something that could fit nicely with the legacy paths and bonuses that are also being introduced. Instead of the simple “A or B” framing, as Frederiksen described it, it’s more like: “I’m here—do I want to stay on this path, or cut into a different one? Should I go with the civilization that matches [your playthrough] in a historical sense, or pick one that reflects the successes I’ve earned through gameplay?”
Beach said the approach to choosing leaders has evolved a great deal over time. “It’s now far more involved and multi-layered than it used to be,” he explained. “At the beginning, if a designer was genuinely fascinated by a particular historical figure, they would likely just include them in the game without much trouble.”
“Right now, we’ve got marketing insights on which regions are buying our game, and that affects the choices we make. We also follow strict rules around gender diversity for our leaders, and we stick to them carefully. We deliberately brought in two PhD historians—one focused on Southeast Asian history and the other on Northern European history—so they can work together and offer useful guidance on what we should include.”
Frederiksen also pointed to earlier public remarks the Firaxis team has shared about picking leaders and civilizations at events like PAX. “We’d have to completely rework [our presentation] if we were to do it now,” he said. “It isn’t the same as it was a decade ago. Every time we show it off, we handle it differently because we’re always listening to our audience—while also studying the world and deepening our understanding of history.”
I was curious about how the Firaxis team thinks about building a game that, in some way, reflects the entirety of human history—and whether that carries any sense of responsibility. Is there tension between demanding, absolute historical accuracy and what makes gameplay work? “For me personally, it’s a little easier than it used to be, especially because we didn’t have two PhD historians on the team before,” Beach joked. He added that they now also support the “narrative” side of civilizations—how leaders might interact and how events can play out over time—“but we’re absolutely holding ourselves to much, much higher standards,” he said.
When it comes to the commitment to accuracy, Frederiksen said, “I think it’s about making sure we’re ‘considering’ [historical significance], not ‘declaring’ it—this isn’t about what’s ‘better’ or ‘right’ or ‘good’; it’s simply what is true.” He continued, “And that’s part of it, just like the different tabletop games around the Firaxis studio. Approach it through these systems.”
Other elements of modern history, like climate change, will return as well. “It’s interesting—when you add something to a Civ game, removing it also sends a message,” Beach observed. “So we’re aware of that. We’re not going to ignore climate change. It might not show up as relevant in the early ages you play, but it won’t be ruled out. There’s always the question of: what message are we communicating by including it or leaving it out, and do we want to get that across?”
There are more changes, and while they might sound small on paper, they end up making a noticeable difference to the experience. One example is the city system, which has been revised again. After Civ 5 “stacked” things together and Civ 6 “unstacked” them into separate district developments outside the city core, Civ 7 uses a blend: buildings can be placed according to your preferences and categorized as either urban or rural districts. As your cities grow, you’re now asked to pick the tile they expand into, rather than it being assigned automatically the way it worked in Civ 6 (except if you bought it with gold). Another shift is that builders have been removed from the game. Instead, you’ll specify a
for your development, and the city immediately begins running.
Another tweak to cities—which I think might be worth a little fine-tuning, at least from what I saw in these early hours—is the introduction of towns. Every new settlement now starts out as a town, and at first it doesn’t have production capabilities. Instead of building districts or units, everything produced in your town goes toward creating gold until it reaches a required level.
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and can be turned into a city – or, into a focused settlement type such as a trade hub or a mining community. It’s still difficult to judge the real impact of this change after such a brief time with the game, but my initial worry is that starting new towns and managing them feels rather routine. My workflow was basically: establish a new one with a settler, choose its specialization, and then leave it alone (at least until I wanted to send a few units there for defense against barbarian raids). Over time, this might actually prove beneficial by reducing the micro-management required for large civilizations with lots of settlements. Still, in the short run, the pleasure I usually get from optimizing a fresh city’s growth was somewhat dulled.
As for barbarians, their systems have shifted too. Barbarian camps are now treated as separate entities, with the possibility of growing into full settlements—or even city-states of their own—depending partly on how you interact with them (and, for instance, city-states won’t show up on the map immediately). They begin with set levels of hostility, though you may be able to earn their cooperation and bring them over to your side—What if we could talk the monsters into it?!—by handling the situation over time. One way to do this is through influence, a new diplomacy resource built for this purpose, as part of a diplomacy overhaul.
In these opening stages, diplomacy may have been the most aggravating change I ran into, although it might simply come down to adjusting how often certain interactions pop up. Leaders you’ve already met will now frequently contact you with offers that go beyond trade deals and alliances, including cultural exchanges, scientific proposals, sanctions, and market fairs. The problem is that even when I was playing with just three other civilizations, these offers felt constant, turning into a never-ending loop of pop-up decision-making as I tried to manage my own game. Usually, you get three choices: decline the offer, which makes them like you slightly less; accept it, which generally helps them a bit more than it helps you (for example, they get +6 food while you gain +2); or “support” the proposal, which gives both sides equal benefits but costs you a portion of Influence.
You’ll need Influence to take part in other meaningful actions—like submitting your own proposals, swaying those independent entities, and more—which quickly pulls you into a rhythm of handling these offers every few turns, similar to an email newsletter where each new message includes an unavoidable quiz. Eventually, I got so fed up with my two closest neighbors constantly forcing me to choose between three options that felt nearly identical in impact, that I declared war on one just to make them stop. Unsubscribe!
One brighter change was a modest rework to how combat works. You now have special commander units that function a bit like more immediately accessible Great Generals, and notably, they’re the only units that earn experience from fighting. They can combine your forces onto a single tile, then release them quickly after you move to a new spot—so staying informed about what’s nearby is essential, or you risk being caught off guard. This also pairs well with the ability to rework your scouts into lookouts that can remain on a tile while providing an extended line of sight.
There’s also a clear shift I expect will land especially well with long-time fans: Civilization 7 has moved back toward a more grounded, realistic art style. Firaxis drew inspiration from historical miniatures and model railways (which you might expect from history enthusiasts) as well as broad works of American Romanticism, including Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountain Landscape. The result feels dense and genuinely absorbing, with a strong level of detail that’s particularly noticeable later in the game—hinting at more complex structures on each individual tile, echoing Beach’s earlier remarks about a city’s layers building up over time.
On top of that, a few extra upgrades are easy to appreciate. You can now move along rivers, enabling more enjoyable sieges on lakeside cities that may sit a few tiles inland—places your fleet couldn’t reach before. The old “goodie huts” now offer you a small choice between two bonuses instead of handing out a single random reward (an interesting nod to Humankind). And trade resources are now directed to towns rather than waiting at a “trading post” table for you to make deals—giving you another system to interact with and, in a way, reducing the role of city optimization, since you can shift resources that support growth, for example, to towns that need to expand.
Despite all of that—and truly, there’s a lot more depth here than a single preview can capture—one of the most striking things about my time with Civilization 7 is how recognizable it feels to play. That has to be, at least in part, thanks to one of studio head Sid Meier’s core “golden rules” for development: with every new release, one-third of a Civilization title should be completely transformed, one-third should be refined and improved through iteration, and the remaining one-third should stay as it is.
Earlier, when we discussed Firaxis’ surprisingly self-critical attitude toward Civ 6, Beach also brought up that guideline. “We had an ambitious list of improvements that we wanted to implement,” he said, “but we must adhere to that principle of 33 percent unchanged, 33 percent just adapted.” It sounded like a limitation just as much as a principle.
“I think the key point isn’t to cling too tightly to the numbers,” Beach told me after I shared it with him, then followed up with a solid example of where that approach didn’t quite go as planned. “There was a time during Civ 7 development when I tried to build a spreadsheet to figure out, mathematically, whether we were going over our 33 percent change allowance,” he admitted, a bit embarrassed.
“I never saw that!” Frederiksen cut in.
“This was before you joined the project…” Beach continued. “I don’t believe any of my designers took it seriously. They were like, ‘Sure, whatever—still, I want this change.’ But even so, it was helpful for me to realize that we might need to revisit certain areas.”
There are more guidelines too, and they often get overshadowed by the better-known rule of thirds. One of them is “double it or halve it.” “We follow that,” Beach shared. “And the third one is that the computer must never be having more fun than the player.”
“Sometimes a designer gets so absorbed in the idea of ‘how history played out here, and how that led into this, and I’m going to model all of it to produce a fascinating simulation.’ But if the player can’t actually see that simulation happen, then the computer—or maybe the designer—is enjoying themselves more than the player.”
In the end, Civilization has always been a reassuring presence for its players: a pleasant little brainteaser you get by clicking Next Turn, and that feeling is still very much here. So no matter how unexpected or unsettling any major new change may be, I’ve found myself trusting Firaxis anyway. That confidence likely comes from those decades-old development ideas—from a studio with an original office chair and a still-working 1991 PC sitting on display at the heart of the team. Playing Civilization 7 feels, if not exactly like slipping on an old pair of comfortable slippers, then at least like trying an updated edition from the same creators for the first time. A group of designers who clearly understand which features made the old version such beloved favorites.
This preview is based on a press trip to Firaxis’ studio in Baltimore. Firaxis/2K provided transportation and accommodation.