I covered the first 50 turns of this game on the first page as we looked at a typical opening sequence for Civ7. This time we'll be looking at the rest of the Ancient era, with a greater focus on the military side of the gameplay and the scoring goals associated with each age. First, I researched the Discipline civic which unlocks army commanders for the first time and grants the player a free commander in the process:
This was one of the biggest selling points for Civ7 as the army commanders were heavily played up by the developers in their various interviews. Army commanders are a replacement for great generals from previous Civilization titles and they function a lot like those same units from back in Civ6, providing additional benefits to units that stand within their surrounding 6 tile radius. However, unlike past Civilization games, army commanders are the only units who gain experience and can take promotions in Civ7, with all of the normal units having no XP or promotions at all. I can see why the developers would want to make this change as it does cut down on some of the micromanagement of juggling promotions on dozens of different units. With that said though, there are one or two clearly optimal paths through the army commander promotion tree that I find myself taking in every game and Civ7's gameplay definitely loses something by removing XP from the normal units themselves.
The biggest difference with army commanders is that they can load up and carry other military units, then unload them when it's time for military combat to begin. The most basic commander promotion allows units to move after being unloaded (which is almost mandatory to take as the first option every time), and that opens up a lot of fancy tactical maneuvering. Units can unload onto rivers or forests which would normally end their turn while still being able to shoot or attack, and savvy players can pull back injured units from the front lines while subbing in fresh ones. This is basically another way of trying to get around the One Unit Per Tile restrictions that have existed since Civ5 and army commanders definitely do help here, both for rejiggering units in crowded places and also moving a group of units across a wide portion of the map. Those of you reading probably know that I still think One Unit Per Tile is a poor fit for the Civilization series and I wish that the developers would simply drop it altogether. Instead we get yet another attempt to bring back a limited version of stacking, and while I do like the army commanders, this still feels like another iteration on a mistaken mechanic.
The army commander was a real help when it came to getting my ballista units into position. These siege units only get a single movement point and they're painfully slow to move anywhere unless they're riding along in the pocket of a commander. Relations had deteriorated to the point of being "Furious" with Amina and I knew it was only a matter of time before she declared war against me. I thought it made more sense to take the fight to her first and try to claim her capital for my own empire. By Turn 60, I had brought most of my army back from clearing out those independent powers in the east and added a pair of ballistas to shoot through Amina's defenses. Archers and slingers struggle mightily against city defenses in Civ7 and you really need ballistas (or naval units if they can reach enemy cities) to crack fortified districts.
But before I could start a war with Amina, I had to clear out this massive eruption of hostile units from the northern independent power Moche. I have no idea where all of these enemies came from but they had a full half dozen units crashing down through the mountains of Jinyang, including their own army commander! The commanders can't attack on their own but they do have a defensive strength value and have health bars, rather than disappearing instantly when attacked as in Civ5 and Civ6. (They are still immortal but have to go into "recovery" time for a while if reduced to zero health.) There were too many hostile forces here for me to attack Amina and I was forced to spend four or five turns shooting down these opponents as they climbed through the mountain passes. I hated to waste the time though at least it did generate some additional experience for my army commander.
Soon enough the barbarians were cleared out and I launched my attack against Amina on Turn 67. Our diplomatic standing was bad enough that this constituted a Formal War with no penalty to either side; starting a conflict against someone with whom you have good relations carries a much larger hit to your war support. That was the number 0 directly under Amina's portrait on the interface; a positive war support results in a combat bonus for your units while a negative war support gives them a penalty. Negative war support also result in extra unhappiness in your own cities, which then translates into lower science and culture yields due to your cities being unhappy. Players can spend influence to bump up their own war support, and it can also be spent to support allies in their wars even if you aren't fighting yourself (the AI certainly loves to support other AIs against you!) This is another gameplay mechanic largely stolen from Amplitude Studios but it genuinely works well in terms of punishing unwarranted aggressors.
When my army crossed the border, Amina had absolutely nothing waiting to defend her capital. I was expecting more in the way of opposition here as my experience has been that the AI is pretty decent at spamming out units, that may be due to the bonuses they get on higher difficulties though. With nothing waiting to contest me, I was able to unload an archer and two ballistas right next to the city center of Aksum and then use one of the army commander's abilities: Focus Fire orders all ranged units to attack the same target while gaining +2 combat strength on each attack. There's also a melee version of the same ability but I've found myself using the ranged version much, much more often. Aksum had no fortified districts at all which meant that it wilted immediately under this assault. Civ7's gameplay allows cities to fortify each and every urban district if desired, and they *ALL* must be captured in order to take a city. This can get pretty tedious at times and I was glad that Amina had fumbled things so badly here.
To no surprise, the city fell on the next turn with the pair of archers Amina had racing back to its defense arriving too late. I was able to take out those ineffective archers quite easily on the next turn and then my units paused to heal up before advancing to their next target. Note as well the keep / raze settlement prompt over on the left-hand side of the screen. While I had every intention of keeping Aksum and converting it into a city down the road, the penalties for razing settlements in Civ7 feel much too high to me. If the player chooses to raze a settlement, it takes turns = population to burn the thing down which can be a very long time once cities start hitting size 15 or size 25. During that time, the burning settlement produces no yields but does generate unhappiness for the rest of your civ, and all future opponents in later wars will start out with 1 bonus war support. Sheesh, do you think that's enough penalties for razing? This is especially obnoxious because the AI likes to plant garbage cities right on your borders and then force you into capturing and keeping them (which counts against the strict settlement limit) or razing them and absorbing all of these penalties. I have no idea what the developers were thinking here - this is way too many penalties for removing enemy cities that you don't want.
I was expecting to fight Amina here, what I wasn't expecting was to find myself facing another war at the same time:
The previous screenshot indicates that I had a little thumbs-up indicator under Trung Trac's portrait on Turn 68 and we had been on good terms throughout the game thus far. Then out of the blue she declared war against me on Turn 70 at what should have been a major penalty given how she was setting our past diplomatic history on fire. I have a screenshot here indicating that I had +74 points of positive diplomacy from various sources... only to be offset by -119 negative points from Trung Trac's war declaration. That was kind of rough given that she was the one who started the conflict! In any case, she must have been spending influence on war support since my value dropped to -1 with her while simultaneously it also dropped to -2 with Amina even though I was running over her territory. I was less worried about the military side of these engagements than I was at the domestic effects of unhappiness hurting my science and culture output. I needed to reach the end of the tech tree before the end of the era to land some of the era scoring goals and depressed science was a threat to that.
That's not to say that the military threat was zero though, not off in the east where Trung Trac had her core cities and I only had the young town of Chengdu. I had a single Cho-ko-nu over here which made a stand in the settlement itself, where it faced off against a Trung Trac elephant that had wandered by. It's worth noting a small difference in terms of how city defenses work in Civ7: they do not get a ranged attack to shoot back at invaders as they do in Civ5 and Civ6, however they do have their own health bars that have to be reduced before they can be captured. If there's a unit stationed inside a settlement on defense, the attacker first has to remove the district defenses to zero and only then can start attacking the defending unit. The enemy elephant redlined Chengdu but my ranged unit knocked out most of its healthbar in the process, then a chariot that I trained over in Jinyi managed to score the final blow. I saw one or two more Trung Trac units over here but fortunately Chengdu wasn't seriously threatened again.
By Turn 75 my main army had made its way north to Amina's second city of Saba and managed to capture it as well. The terrain here was difficult to cross given the presence of a navigable river plus cliffs and mountains in the area as well. Those navigable rivers (tiles that ships can sail through, sometimes deep into the interior of continents) are one of the best new features in Civ7 even if this one was a bit of a pain here. Amina once again didn't have that much in the way of defense and I was able to take this spot without suffering any casualties. She had only a single settlement remaining but I decided that it made more sense to sue for peace here rather than push on for the complete elimination. My happiness had dropped down to a mere 2 happy faces on the interface thanks to being two settlements over the limit at 8/6, and furthermore I had Trung Trac nipping at my heels to worry about over in the east. I thought that it made more sense to sign a temporary treaty for now, let the unhappiness associated with those two city captures dissipate for a bit, then come back and finish the job after the 10 turns of enforced peace were over. I could even use this time to whack that annoying independent power Moche which was still spitting out barbarians in the vicinity.
This brief peace interlude provided an opportunity to showcase one of the other new mechanics in Civ7, town specialization:
I had converted two towns into cities thus far but Liangzhou was a bit different as I intended to keep it as a town permanently. As a reminder, towns produce food and gold normally but they do not have a build queue and any production that they make gets translated into gold. In theory, this would mean that high production sites should make for excellent towns... except that production is the most important yield in Civ7 so any spot with high production is better off simply being turned into a city! Therefore towns tend to be most useful for grabbing resources in out-of-the-way spots or by transforming them into farming/fishing villages designed to emphasize high food. Liangzhou didn't have the most amazing food output but I still thought this would be the best use of its tundra iceball location.
By default, towns have the growth focus which increases their growth by 50% (in reality it decreases their cost to fill the food box by 50%). Upon reaching size 7, the player is prompted with the opportunity to pick one of these alternate specializations instead. On choosing anything other than the growth focus, the town will stop increasing in size and send all of its excess food to other connected cities (only connected cities, not other connected towns). It will also receive one of these other side benefits, most of which are pretty useless in normal gameplay. Something is seriously wrong if the player needs to use the fort town specialization while it's hard to justify the urban center option when simply converting into a city would produce far superior beakers and culture. The fishing town adds extra food to all of the rural districts that produce food, thus making the town better at sending food to other cities, which is why I usually find myself taking this choice. The trade outpost is OK if you really need extended trade route range and there's an influence pick in later eras that grants more influence for every connected settlement which can also be situationally useful. But mostly, if you're planning on keeping a settlement as a town, it's best to specialize for more food to ship off to your nearby cities.
There's actually a lot of debate right now in the Civ7 community as far as whether it's better to keep some settlements as towns or simply convert everything over to cities. I honestly don't know the answer to that question; maybe this comparative game will help shed light on that question. I used a mixture of cities and planned out towns over the course of this game.
It was starting to get closer to the end of the Ancient era so let's take a moment to discuss the various legacy scoring goals. This is one of the most controversial parts of Civ7, as that trophy icon in the top-left corner of the screen ticks slowly ticks up in percentage increments and the age comes to a close when it hits 100%. The meter increases on its own with the passage of time and goes up even faster as the various empires achieve the four scoring goals in each age. I pasted in those four scoring categories for the Ancient era: have 7 world wonders, have 12 settlements in your empire (captured ones counting double), display 10 codices in your empire, and assign 20 resources to your total settlements. These scoring goals are legitimately pretty good for the Ancient era as they mostly reward the player for things that they would be doing anyway. Expansion is obviously good and getting legacy points for that feels natural. The codices are easy to achieve if your empire has a lot of science so that category functions as a research check. Resources are really powerful in Civ7 and you always want to have more of them so assigning a scoring goal there works as well, plus the player can trade for more resources if they lack enough resources in their starting area. Only the Cultural category based on building wonders is a real dud for me, as most of the Ancient era wonders are terrible and rarely worth building. I don't like the notion that I'm forced into building useless things to achieve some kind of arbitrary scoring goal picked out before the game even began.
For the purposes of CivFanatics GOTM2, players were tasked with trying to achieve as many of these scoring goals as possible in each era. I was confident that I could land almost all of them without much trouble; Silk Roads had already hit the 2/3rds mark and would easily reach 20 resources before the end of the age. I had fewer codices but research was humming along nicely and I didn't think I'd have trouble reaching 10 of them on the tech tree. Most of the codices are handed out for researching the "mastery" version of the techs in the Ancient era, stuff that you would need to skip in a tight game while being easy pickings in a lower difficulty setting like this one. The military goal was also within reach as I had 10/12 scoring in that category, with Amina's two cities each counting double points. The wonder scoring was something that I figured I would probably miss as I simply didn't care about pursuing it. I built the best Ancient era wonder in the Hanging Gardens and I'd pick up any other wonders that looked helpful, but I preferred to construct useful buildings over pointless wonders solely to achieve this legacy scoring option.
Even as my military units were in the process of razing the hostile independent power of Moche, elsewhere I was befriending the independent power of Gungnae. The way that this mechanic works is that the player can spend a big sum of influence (170 in the Ancient era) to begin the process of allying with an independent power. That big 170 influence payout will start incrementing a relations meter with that specific IP, adding 2 points per turn until maxing out at 60 points. Hostile independent powers start the meter at zero points while normal independent powers will begin at 30 points, thus it usually takes either 30 turns or 15 turns to complete the process of befriending them. This can be sped up by investing even more influence which I rarely have enough on hand to spare. Whichever empire maxes out the meter first gets the benefits of friendship with that independent power, and it tends to be pretty easy to ally with at least some independent powers because the AI civs are always wasting their influence on other stuff. I wanted to become friends with Gungnae because this iceball corner of the map wasn't worth my own settlement and the AI was certain to plant a city here if I razed them. (Trung Trac actually *DID* put a settlement here briefly only to have it razed by the units from the independent power - hooray for the little guy!)
Independent powers always appear as one of four types: Cultural, Commercial, Military, or Scientific. They provide different benefits when befriending based on the type of the IP, and the general consensus is that the Commercial and Scientific types are the best while the Military ones are almost worthless. You can get a minor boost to combat strength from the Military IPs but there are a ton of ways to get combat strength and otherwise they don't do much of anything. Gungnae was a Commercial IP that provided these options and the Cultural and Scientific ones tend to look much like this, only swapping out culture and beakers for gold in terms of the benefits. I ended up taking the Emporium option because it seemed like the most interesting choice: +2 gold in any city that had a resource assigned (i.e. all of them) and granted the ability to construct a unique tile improvement that added +2 gold to a rural district. These unique tile improvements are nice to have since they are classified as ageless, not losing their benefits on the age transition, and they add onto the yield of previously existing rural districts rather than replacing them. Han China of course has its own unique tile improvement, the Great Wall, which adds culture to a rural district - now I could choose either one of those unique improvements. This is unfortunately a major reason why civs with unique tile improvements are weaker than civs with unique quarters: the player can obtain other unique tile improvements from the IPs but you can't ever access the two urban buildings that make up a unique quarter without playing as their associated civ. And each rural district can only ever have one unique tile improvement present; no doubling up on both a Great Wall and an Emporium on the same tile, unfortunately.
Both wars and peace treaties have an enforced 10 turn duration in Civ7. You can't end a war for at least ten turns after it begins and a new war can't start until after ten turns have passed on the previous treaty. Well, I had signed peace with Amina on Turn 77 earlier and therefore I declared a new conflict on Turn 87 with the intention of wiping out her final city and securing me the last two legacy points in the Military category. Her nearby city of Zala-Bet-Makeda had taken the time to fortify the center tile which meant that I had to chew through Ancient walls for the first time. As in Civ6, the presence of those walls slowed down my attack by a few turns though I still had a ballista firing away to do full damage to the fortifications. The city fell on Turn 91 and I thought that would be the end of Amina.
But I was wrong - she was still alive! This was a true mystery to me because I had pretty much the entirety of the continent explored by this point and the only fogged area was deep in Rome's heartland where I doubted Amina had managed to establish a settlement. It wasn't until a few turns later that I finally spotted where she was hiding: waaaaaaaay up in the northeast on a tiny offshore iceball island. Seriously, are you kidding me?! 
What rotten luck that she managed to get a settler all the way up there shortly before my forces swooped in to capture the last city in her core. The AI leaders in Civ7 have this utterly bizarre penchant for planting cities on the other side of the map while they ignore fertile land right next to their capitals. It's extremely annoying and it makes them all look insane so I really hope this gets fixed soon. Like, there was plenty of open space directly north of Zala-Bet-Makeda; why in the world would you settle 35 tiles away in the Arctic instead of next door??? Now I still had to deal with Amina being a pain, plus Trung Trac had immediately piled into this conflict as well to harass me with additional negative war support. Argh!
Capturing that city from Amina was enough for me to finish the Military legacy scoring for the Ancient era at 12/12 points, with 6 points for founding six of my own settlements and then another 6 points for capturing three enemy settlements. Whenever the player or any AI civ achieves one of these scoring goals, it increases the era percentage in the corner of the screen. There are three tiers for each of the legacy scoring categories and the final one for completely achieving the goal ticks up the era percentage by the largest amount. For example, capturing Zala-Bet-Makeda increased the counter from 62% to 70% in a single turn and therefore finishing one of the scoring categories was worth something like 8% progress towards the next age. A better game would simply show the actual era score points instead of obscuring it behind percentages and forcing the player to guess what might happen from finishing scoring categories, but this is Civ7 and it can't even display the number of beakers needed to research each tech so.... yeah.
We were approaching the end of the Ancient era and that meant the onset of a "crisis", another new addition to Civ7's gameplay. The idea here is that some kind of worldwide disaster strikes at the conclusion of each age, causing civilization to collapse and then forcing the need to rebuild over the ruins of the previous era; this is the justification for all of the building yields being downgraded at the start of each new age. This is kind of a side point, but this is really, REALLY bad history that would result in a failing grade in any undergraduate course today. Professional historians do not talk in terms of big distinct "ages" (which is historiographically 50 years if not 100 years out of date) and most of them strongly emphasize continuities over time, not these kind of sharp breaking points. I'm well aware that games need to focus on gameplay first and foremost but this still really bugs me because it's promoting embarassingly bad and outdated stuff. A flagship game with this kind of budget could do way better.
In gameplay terms, the onset of a crisis means that some kind of negative event will take place and the player is forced to pick burdensome "crisis" social policies from their own special category. I took this Tribute option as the least-bad choice because I was only the suzerain of a single city state. (Wait, aren't they independent powers now in Civ7? Whoops, I guess this game can't even keep its internal text consistent. 
) The global effect of this crisis was to start spawning new hostile independent powers all across the map, anywhere with open terrain. My core was densely settled enough to rule out new IPs appearing there but I'd have to spend a lot of time and energy smacking down these new barbarians on the fringes of my territory where they kept appearing like mushrooms after a rainstorm.
As the turns continued ticking down towards the upcoming era transition, I focused on getting as much done as possible in my cities which would carry over into the next age. The handful of buildings tagged with the "ageless" aspect were must-haves everywhere and it was still worthwhile to construct many of the urban districts even if their yields would be greatly reduced in the Exploration era. Better to get 2 beakers/turn from an obsolete academy than no beakers at all. I was experiencing a happiness crunch at the moment due to being over the settlement limit and having some unrest from my recent conquests so altars and villas were the order of the day wherever possible. Typically I try to construct the production-generating buildings first in every city since they speed up everything else, then afterwards focus on science and gold followed by culture and happiness at a lesser priority. One small tip to keep in mind: monuments and villas retain their influence even after obsoleting in the next age, and since influence is so hard to get, they remain very useful buildings despite being outdated. When in doubt, the food-generating buildings like gardens and baths tends to be the most skippable since they don't seem to do very much. (Seriously, the math behind how much food is needed to keep growing is utterly absurd in Civ7, even given that each population doesn't have to feed itself as in past Civilization games. Did the developers understand that this setup makes farms almost completely useless?)
Town specialization feels like it does a much better job of providing extra food for city growth. This was Amina's former capital of Aksum where I had spent the full 1000 gold to convert into a city. It was connected to the city of Jinyang and my other recent conquest of Saba, with the latter town having an especially high food surplus once I switched its focus. In fact, Saba was sending 31 food/turn over to Aksum and effectively tripling its growth rate; Aksum would quickly become one of my best cities once I was able to pave over the AI's inept former management. It would be really nice if the player could choose where these specialized towns would send their food; sadly, there is no such ability in the gameplay right now. I thought that Aksum would also have a connection to Zala-Bet-Makeda but apparently it didn't for no clear reason. You basically have to look at the map and guess what's going to be connected to what - not great.
The era counter kept leaping upwards as I hit the various scoring goals for the Ancient era. I had initially landed the Military objective, then there was another increase of 7-8% when my cities reached 20 connected resources for the Economic category. The Science category followed as I polished off the last remaining masteries for the final codices, along with building enough libraries and academies to hold everything. This took the era counter up to 90% where the ongoing crisis hit the point of culmination and I was forced to slot in three more crisis policies: -5 gold for each imported resource (zero), -1 happiness in all cities for each commander level, and -6 combat strength against independent powers. These were quite annoying and they effectively prevented me from carrying out any further expansion due to lack of happiness and gold. I did manage to convert Handan into a city, at the cost of another 1000 gold, for an even split of 5 cities / 5 towns across my ten settlements. That was the limit of what I was able to achieve, however, and it felt as though I was spinning my wheels in place during these turns. I find the whole crisis mechanic to be obnoxious and I turn them off in my own games, which fortunately you have the option to do on the setup screen. (I wish I could say the same for the natural disasters which fire much too often and cannot be switched off. Why is that not an option?!)
The crisis was also continuing to spawn endless waves of hostile independent powers. There were enough of them that my mature cities spent some time training more military units, which was fine because those units would carry over into the next era. I added a second army commander as well which would let more of the units survive the era jump. I was also trying to reach Amina to deliver the killing blow only to run afoul of these waves of barbarians. The triple IPs up here in the northeast were spitting out units at a fantastic rate, and the same army that had effortlessly carved up Amina's core found itself unable to advance to the northern coastline. I must have killed at least a dozen enemy units during these turns but more always seemed to appear. This was super annoying since I wanted to get Amina out of the game and these hostile forces ran interference for her. Why did she have to plant that iceball city, argh!
I also built some of these Shi Dafu Great People at the capital when I didn't have anything else to train. They can only be recruited at a city with at least 10 population and their actual ability is randomly drawn from a list of potential options (none of which are shown to the player, naturally). I did some searching online to find the list of options and most of them add to science in some way: the pictured +4 science on an academy, +1 science on all codices in a city, 1 free random tech, +1 codex, +1 population in a city, 1 extra promotion on a commander, +3 influence on the palace, and trigger a new celebration. Everything there is in the "nice to have" category without being terribly critical, and the random nature of the benefit makes these units much less useful. I have the feeling that Civ7's developers realized at some point that their gameplay was shaping up without having Great People present, something that's been around in each game since Civ3, and then awkwardly shoved in this mechanic at the last minute. Only a handful of civs even have Great People and all of them are equally as janky as the Shi Dafu. This is a unit that feels out of place and probably shouldn't exist.
I built the Pyramid of the Sun (+2 culture on quarters) and Petra (+1 production and +1 gold on desert terrain) during these final turns as the most useful wonders. I definitely could have built more of them and just didn't because most of their benefits didn't seem helpful. I would end up at 3/7 for the wonder category as a result and definitely should have squeezed in one more wonder somewhere to hit 4/7 which would have given me another legacy point in the Cultural category. This was sloppy of me but it does also speak to the inflexibility of the legacy scoring goals. Why exactly was my civ being judged on its ability to construct wonders, especially wonders that I didn't want or need? I don't mind collecting resources or scientific codices because they help me do things that I'm already doing but the wonder-building category rubs me the wrong way. This gets much worse in the next two eras where the legacy scoring categories are badly designed - more on this in the rest of the report.
I held off on researching the final Future Tech for as long as possible, keeping it 1 turn away from completion until the era meter ticked up to 99%, then finished it on Turn 129 to complete the Ancient age:
Researching Future Tech with its extremely anachronistic tech icon is worth "10 era points" which apparently translated into something like a 4% extra increase on the meter. Good thing I held off on completing the tech for as long as possible. I was quite pleased overall with how the Ancient era had played out, with 10 settlements being the absolute limit that I think I could have controlled given the low settlement cap and the ongoing unhappiness from the era-ending crisis. China's science and culture yields were extraordinarily far in front of the pack of AI civs where only Augustus had managed to do a decent job of expanding. He was somehow making all of 15 beakers/turn, mind you, but he did have 7 settlements! My biggest regret was not being able to eliminate Amina and I think I was pretty unlucky that she founded that tundra refuge in the most inaccessible spot possible on this continent. I could have reached her pretty much anywhere else, and still would have gotten her if the crisis hadn't flooded me with a biblical plague of barbarians.
As mentioned above, I hit all of the legacy scoring goals pretty easily except for the wonders category. The AI often seems to do the best in that one because they will waste production on useless garbage like Dur-Sharrukin (makes your fortified districts stronger) and rack up Cultural scoring points in the process. What this table doesn't show is that I was much, much further ahead in many of these categories before the end of the era and the happiness limitations from the settlement cap forced me to stop expanding. None of the AI leaders had more than 6 resources connected when I hit 20 of them, for example, and I think Himiko was getting a bunch of her resources from trade routes, not her own cities. And while it can be fun to chase after the legacy scoring goals for a little while, the fact that they *NEVER* change from game to game starts to get tiring pretty quickly. Did the developers really expect you to keep doing the same thing in every game over and over again? Are we sure that they thought this idea through properly?
Therefore I had 10 legacy points for this era out of a possible 12 (wonders, blah). Himiko did reasonably well in these categories and then the other AIs were all complete duds. Not entirely surprising given that this was Viceroy difficulty but they often don't do that much better even with the difficulty dialed up. These legacy points would translate into additional benefits at the start of the Exploration era, and while that sounds good, it feeds back into the same issue in the last paragraph: to translate my advantages into the next era, I have to do the same things in every game over and over again. Having triple the science and cultural output of the AI civs doesn't really matter if I don't achieve the associated science and cultural legacy goals, and everyone gets boosted back to tech parity at the start of the next age no matter how pathetic they might be. So much for having a tech lead, eh? 
It's easy to see why a large portion of the playerbase has found Civ7's gameplay frustrating and the number of people playing the game in the Steam tracking data continues dropping to dangerously low numbers. I personally do not think the whole era system and legacy scoring goals were a good idea for this franchise to take.
And on that note, on to the Exploration age! We've actually seen the best part of the gameplay thus far, with the Ancient era having by far the best design and most competent AI performance. It all goes downhill from here so buckle up as we explore how things deteriorate as we move into the early modern period.
