Civ7 Introduction: CivFanatics Game of the Month #2
Part One

I did not pick the settings for this game which were instead chosen by the CivFanatics staff. We would be playing as Confucius for our leader, which was somewhat unfortunate since he was the same leader that I had picked for my initial Livestream game, ah well. Confucius has two straightforward leader bonuses: +2 science on specialists and +25% growth rate in cities. The growth rate ability is an early example of the poor state of Civ7's interface: it's doesn't actually increase "growth" at all, instead reducing the food cost to grow by 25%. In other words, a city that would normally require 100 food to grow to the next size will require 75 food instead - very confusing for no clear reason! These are very solid leader bonuses and Confucius is above average in my estimation, a nicely flexible leader who can take the gameplay in pretty much any direction desired.

One of the big selling points for Civ7 was splitting leaders and civilizations apart, allowing anyone to play as Augustus Caesar of the Mayans and whatnot. (All of the advertising of this "new" feature seems to have ignored the fact that Civ4 already did this in the Beyond the Sword expansion and our Multiplayer community has been taking advantage of this setting for the last 20 years.) We would be sticking with a historical choice for GOTM2, however, as players were instructed to take Han China, then Ming China, and then Qing China for the three ages. The Han are a below-average civ for the Ancient era, getting a crossbow with higher defensive strength (not too useful), a Great Person called the Shi Dafu that has unpredictable abilities and doesn't seem to have much of a purpose. They do also get an extra population point on founding each new settlement which is nice at getting out to a faster start. The main feature of the Han is a unique tile improvement called the Great Wall, something that's situationally useful but greatly overshadowed by the unique quarters available to other civs. The Han do not have a unique quarter at all and this makes them a lot weaker than many of their peers. Everyone would be in the same boat for this game though which should be fun.

The CFC staff also picked a Standard size map, bigger than the Small ones that I typically choose to cut down on micromangement. Finally, the game was also set to Viceroy difficulty which is the third out of six options available. This was a good choice to help draw in more players of different skill levels although it was much lower than the difficulty settings that I tend to use. The challenge in this game was going to come from the scoring objectives and competing against the wider Civ7 community, not the AI dunces that I'd be playing against.

This was the view that greeted me upon downloading the online save file. Civ7 has a whole bunch of different terrain types: grassland tiles can be flat, or wet, or rough, or vegetated and all of them have slightly different yields. Then the same terrain modifiers apply to the other base terrain types as well, plains and tropical and desert and tundra and snow. It can be quite difficult telling these various terrain types apart because the details are sometimes miniscule; a tiny clump of bushes makes something "vegetated" while three rocks off in the corner will make a tile "rough" and cause a unit to lose all of its movement on entering. I've had to play the game with the tile yields on at all times to prevent my units from getting unexpectedly stuck while doing simple movement, and the whole thing makes for some real headaches.

In terms of picking out city sites, however, the most important factor to consider comes in the form of the nearby resources. The base terrain types actually don't matter much at all, as a grassland farm is identical to a plains farm which is identical to a desert farm and a tundra farm. Those resources matter a lot though, especially in the early game, where some of them are vastly better than others. For example, that gold resource to the southeast of the start has a global benefit of making building purchases 20% cheaper. That's a nice benefit but it doesn't do much to accelerate your early growth curve. By way of contrast, that sheep resource has +2 production on it which helps out a ton if it can be grabbed quickly. Since the sheep tile was by far the best of these nearby resources, I moved the starting settler a tile northwest to bring it into range sooner, then founded my capital on the following turn.

Here was the view inside my capital city of Chang'an when it prompted me to pick a tile upon planting the city. (Note that Civ7 did *NOT* allow players to rename cities here on release which is nothing short of incredible given how easy it should be to code that.) Right away, this is where Civ7 breaks decisively from past games in the series: there are no workers or builders in this game and no population points to manage. Instead, whenever the city's food box fills up, the player is prompted with a growth event like this one where they can choose a tile to expand onto. That tile then becomes a rural district and whatever yields it produces are permanently added to the city's output. There is no tile swapping in this game and no opportunity to change what type of improvement goes onto a rural district. For example, the river tiles northeast of Chang'an will always get fishing boat improvements, the tile to the southeast will always get a farm, and the two forest tiles to the west will always get woodcutters.

This might sound at first like a dumbed-down system because of the lack of population management and workers/builders, however after a bit of experience with Civ7's gameplay I can attest that it really isn't. City building is instead quite complex and it's probably the single best aspect of the overall gameplay. It's very important to choose the correct tiles in the correct sequence to get your cities up and snowballing quickly, while also pairing them with the associated early techs on the tech tree. Later on, knowing what buildings to put down in what location for the best adjacency bonuses also gets very complicated very quickly. Cities will slowly grow outward in organic fashion, adding more tile improvements to the landscape as they go, in a process that's a ton of fun to experience. Best of all, the player ALWAYS chooses where each city will expand next - none of that random tile picker nonsense from Civ5 and Civ6! I have a lot of criticisms of Civ7 but the city building provides an excellent experience right now.

I wanted to get over to the sheep resource so my initial city growth went for a fishing boat to the northeast. (I would have founded the city over there but you can't settle on navigable river tiles.) Then because Han China gets a second population growth for one of their innate abilities, I was able to grow a second time onto the sheep tile. This added a pasture tile automatically for a 1 food / 1 production / 1 happiness yield. Then I assigned the sheep resource to the city of Chang'an on the resource screen:

Which then added another 2 production and 2 happiness to the city as well, making that tile have an effective yield of 1 food / 3 production / 3 happiness. That was far better than the 1 food / 1 gold / 1 happiness from the fishing boat next door! Cities have a limited number of these resource slots so it's important to grab as many of them as possible and then assign them wherever they'll do the most good. There's a camel resource that adds two more resource slots to a city and which is considered to be one of the most desirable ones in the game since there are few ways to add more of these slots. This was the best way that I could see to open up the start and now the capital would have to grow on its own for a bit before I'd get the chance to pick another tile.

The capital always gets to pick a 1-turn scout or a 1-turn warrior for the opening build, and you should essentially always pick the scout since they are far better at doing initial exploration. Scouts have this fun Search ability to help reveal the map:

Clicking that button will end the scout's turn in exchange for pushing out their sight an extra tile and revealing all "discoveries" (goody huts) at twice that range. The screenshot above shows just how far away this scout could see, revealing stuff four tiles away in every direction along with discoveries even further away in the fog. The CivFanatics staff had even chosen a starting memento that added an extra +1 sight for scouts which is why this guy could see so far; this is one of the better initial mementos and was actually nerfed by Firaxis in the initial Civ7 patch. The other memento chosen by the CFC staff caused the player to begin with an extra 200 gold and I would be putting that to good use as well soon. First up was sending the scout off to grab those discoveries while training a second scout to explore in the other direction.

This is the Ancient era tech tree in Civ7 with the two later era tech trees looking a lot like this one. Players have a choice between three starting techs: Sailing, Pottery, or Animal Husbandry, and the choice of which to pursue first is extremely important for getting off to a fast start. Of the three, Sailing is clearly the weakest option for the vast majority of starts. While it grants +1 food on fishing boats (and I had one of them here), it adds no production to any tiles and doesn't unlock any buildings that add production either. Since production is by far the most important stat in Civ7, opening with Fishing is rarely a good idea. Therefore the choice usually comes down to Pottery or Animal Husbandry, with Pottery adding +1 food on plantations and +1 production to clay pits while Animal Husbandry adds +1 food on pastures and +1 production on camps and woodcutters.

Animal Husbandry was an easy pick for this game. I already had a pasture on the sheep resource and I'd be grabbing the nearby horse resource soonish which also used the pasture rural district. Then there was also an ivory resource which would be improved by a camp, and a couple of forests which would utilize woodcutters. All of these tiles would benefit immediately from researching Animal Husbandry (the little plus symbol on the interface is an innate benefit from the tech) and then they would get a further boost from constructing a Saw Pit which would another +1 production on camps and woodcutters. You need to match your initial city growths with your starting research and building constructions to maximize the early game snowball. This was a start where the terrain lined up very nicely with the nearby resources and this particular tech.

The first goody hut that my scout explored offered me 100 gold at the cost of -50% culture for the next three turns. This was another easy decision as that gold could be used to accelerate the development of Chang'an. Along with the 200 gold from the starting memento, this was more than enough to purchase a quick granary in the capital city. The granary is a "warehouse" building in Civ7, which means that it boosts the yields of a certain type of rural district, in this case extra food from farms, pastures, and plantations. I only had the sheep improved with a pasture thus far but the horses would follow soon thereafter plus the granary always produces 1 food/turn itself which would make this a pretty good deal. Food isn't that useful longterm in Civ7 because the city growth costs scale up in astronomical fashion, however it's still important here in the early game to grab the first few tiles quickly. Cities also can't start training settlers until reaching size 5 so early growth matters there as well.

I'll mention two others things from this screenshot. First of all, the granary is an example of an "ageless" building which means that it never loses its yields during era transitions. Buildings that lack this tag will downgrade their yields when moving into the next era, something that annoys me quite a bit and didn't really need to be part of the gameplay. Leaving that aside for the moment though, at least I wouldn't have to worry about that with the granary or the saw pit. These buildings also create an urban district when placed on the map:

Urban districts must be placed at first next to the city center tile and from there can be placed next to the city center or any other urban district. Thus I could not put the granary over by the sheep resource (even though I could have placed another rural district up there) because there were no urban districts in the northeast yet. If the player chooses to build an urban district over a previously-existing rural district, the city gets an immediate growth event to compensate, and this can be useful sometimes to pave over older rural districts with urban ones. A maximum of two buildings can be placed together on an urban district; this tile then becomes known as a "quarter" and there are a bunch of bonuses that apply on a per-quarter basis. Note that Civ7's interface and internal documentation are terrible at explaining all of this and I largely had to figure it out through trial and error. If this feels a bit complicated, that's because it is, and the AI does an abysmal job of developing its cities under this system.

I chose to place the granary west of the city center tile as it brought the city closer to the horses tile. The new building was worth an extra population point (as city population is simply the tally of all rural districts, urban districts, and specialists) to take Chang'an up to size 4. It would also allow the city to grab the horses on next population growth instead of a weaker non-resource woodcutter, not bad! I think this was the best way to play the initial turns though I'm interested to see what some other players did here. Oh, and did you see the production cost of the granary in the previous screenshot? That information always disappears from the Civ7 interface after a little while of playing, just like the tile yield ribbons in the corner of the screen are always vanishing. Civ7 seems to have some kind of a memory leak that causes information to vanish continuously even when it should be present.

My scout had barely left the capital's vicinity before it bumped into the scout of a rival nation:

Well this wasn't what I wanted to see. I had found Amina who was piloting the Aksumite civilization and she was much closer than I would have liked. I've found Amina to be one of the more aggressive leaders in Civ7 and I doubted that I'd be able to remain on peaceful terms with her for very long. This did give me an opportunity to make use of the new influence mechanic though, where I spent 20 influence for the "friendly" greeting which is how I was able to see the location of Amina's capital. Influence as a mechanic was quite literally stolen from the turn-based strategy games created by Amplitude Studios, the group that made Endless Space and Endless Legend and Humankind. This is the diplomacy resource and the player needs to spend it to do pretty much anything in Civ7. While stealing this gameplay mechanic is kind of lame, Civ7 does an excellent job of making influence a thoroughly useful resource and something that the player always wants more of. For example, look at this:

Once I had 60 influence saved up, I proposed this research collaboration with Amina. She could accept the proposal at a cost of no influence, which would grant her 2 beakers/turn while giving me 4 beakers/turn, or she could pay influence to support the collaboration which would grant BOTH of us 6 beakers/turn. Since my whole civ was making a grand total of 10 beakers/turn at the moment, this was a massive increase of a full 60%! Fortunately Amina did support my proposal and China's teching pace was greatly advanced for the next 15 turns. There are a couple of limitations to these endeavors to keep in mind: each civ can only have one research collaboration in place at a time (though you can have both a research collaboration and a cultural collaboration going at once), and which endeavors can be proposed depend on which leader you happen to be playing. I could always propose research collaborations because Confucius has the Scientific tag, but I couldn't nominate cultural collaborations because he lacked the Cultural trait. I had to wait for an AI leader to propose a cultural offer to me and then I could support it, but I couldn't initiate it myself. There are a whole bunch of these endeavors and they make the influence system a real winner, along with creating some big incentives to work together peacefully with other nations.

The next few turns were pretty quiet. I had a narrative event pop up that offered me some future beakers or future culture versus an immediate warrior, and I of course took the instant warrior to help me explore the map faster. Even one additional discovery from that warrior would more than offset getting 50 science something like 25 turns down the road. I continued taking gold whenever it was an option from a goody hut or a narrative event, landing another 75 gold on Turn 12 that put me close to another purchased building. I hit exactly 220 gold shortly thereafter which went for a purchased Saw Pit in the capital - I couldn't afford to tie up the build queue for 6 turns constructing that building when there were more important things to get out. The timing of the second scout had lined up perfectly with growth to size 5 in the capital which allowed me to start a settler on Turn 7, about as soon as possible in this game. I already knew that I had to grab that disputed zone over by Amina before she could get her own settler out.

On Turn 14, I finally discovered the first civic and was able to slot in my first social policy:

Yes, social policies are back from Civ6 and culture still functions like a second tech tree in this game as well. The social policies seem to be a lot less fleshed out in this game though, and my general feeling is that culture isn't as important in this game as it was in Civ6. Many of the social policies are downright terrible although of course there are some real gems here and there too. The social policy slots also work a bit differently in this game; rather than being tied to a type of government, the player always starts with one slot and gains an additional slot each time that the happiness meter ticking in the background results in a celebration. More on happiness in a minute. The starting two policies ask the player to pick between culture or production/science, and of course I took production because it's the most important yield to emphasize in Civ7. I'd have to unlock better options here as I advanced through the civics tree.

The first civic discovery in each age also unlocks a choice of government, with these being the three Ancient era options. These bonuses only kick in during the aforementioned celebrations and last for 10 turns; note as well that there's no option of changing governments after making the initial selection. I've typically been taking Oligarchy in the Ancient era and did so again in this game, as both the food and the production on building construction bonuses can be useful at times. Extra production on wonders and training units feels much less useful to me, though the extra science from Despotism is another solid choice. In order to trigger those celebrations, Civ7 has a ticking happiness meter in the background that counts up the happiness displayed at the top of the screen each turn, and when the invisible happiness box gets filled up completely it starts a celebration. Unfortunately, the game never tells the player how much happiness is needed for the next celebration, only listing "13 turns remaining" instead of a numerical value. The cost of techs and civics work the same way, with Civ7 refusing to ever give an actual cost of something in beakers or culture. Why does the game insist on never telling the player how much things actually cost?!

Over the next few turns, I continued exploring the map with my pair of scouts and freebie warrior. I was able to find another discovery where I lost one turn of cultural output in exchange for a migrant in the capital, a unit that adds an additional population point when merged into a city. I also found that there were a number of different city states in the area around my start, which have been renamed in Civ7 into "independent powers" or IPs. These can be befriended by investing lots of influence into them, again much like how the same system works in Endless Space or Humankind, though some of them always roll with hostile status and will pop out Civ7's version of barbarians. The IPs also simply take up space on the map and I knew that I'd need to clear some of them out of the way to place my own settlers down; they can no longer be captured as in Civ5 and Civ6.

By Turn 16 my first settler had made its way over to the west where I picked this spot to establish Jinyang (again, no option to choose a name myself for this settlement). Jinyang was officially a "town" and not a city, with this being an important distinction in Civ7. Towns grow normally and produce gold from their tile yields, however they do not have production queues at all. Any production that they generate gets converted into additional gold, with the intention being that towns exist to serve in a support role for full cities. Units and buildings can be rush-bought in towns though of course it's not really practical to spend gold for everything; players will almost always want more build queues somewhere beyond the capital. Towns can be converted into cities via a one-time gold payment, which starts at roughly 400-500 gold (varying based on population size) and escalates from there up to 1000 gold. The capital is the only settlement that begins as a city and everything else has to start as a town before eventually turning into a city. It's important to plan out which of your settlements will become cities down the road and which ones are intended to remain permanently as towns, since this will influence what rural districts should be added. I knew that I wanted Jinyang to become a city to serve as a border fortress with Amina, it would just take some time to scrounge up the money for conversion.

Using Han China's civ ability, I started out with two rural districts on the iron and camel resources upon founding Jinyang. These additional tiles didn't add any beakers or culture to my civ, but they did more than double my income as Jinyang's production was converted into gold and jumped me from 8 coins per turn up to 17 per turn. The one downside to grabbing two production-heavy resource tiles was slower growth at Jinyang itself due to lack of food tiles. It can be quite useful to have some towns never upgrade to cities and give them nothing but farms and fishing boats for their rural districts, emphasizing food because once they reach size 7 they can specialize in a couple of different directions and send that excess food back to other cities. I was already planning out where I wanted to set up a few of these farming/fishing towns to support my real cities. As for Jinyang, I rush-purchased a granary here once I had the gold available which helped it grow a good bit faster and also expanded borders close enough to grab the nearby cotton resource with the town's next rural district.

There were quite a few of those independent powers near the starting position, between cultural Moche to the north and then this trio of IPs off in the east. Annoyingly, all three of the IPs over here had gone hostile from the start of the game and they were spawning what were effectively barbarian units to harass my fledgling country. On top of that, they were also blocking me from establishing new settlements where I wanted to place them! Wiryeseong was stopping me from putting a town in that fertile river valley by the cluster of cotton resources. While there was room for a settlement due north of Chang'an, the land was a lot weaker there and it lacked strong early resources to boostrap its growth. Therefore I trained a pair of early Cho-ko-nus to shoot down Wiryeseong and clear the territory for my own settlement. The fighting was hot enough that one of my ranged units died when it was ganged up on by three barbarian units, however I traded its life for all three of the enemy swords and managed to clear the independent power on Turn 29. I had a settler waiting in place to found my own settlement on the same turn, fortunately only losing two turns twiddling its thumbs while the Cho-ko-nus polished off the opposition.

While that combat was taking place, I finished researching Mysticism civic and opened up the unique Han civics tree for the first time. Every civ in Civ7 has their own miniature civics tree like this one, usually consisting of three or four different civics that can be researched using culture. The player can progress through the normal civics tree or through their nation's unique civics that no one else can access. This is a really cool idea and one of the best parts of Civ7 - I wish that the rest of the game were as well-designed as this one small mechanic! The Han have four unique civics in their tree and for the most part the options here are pretty mediocre. The first choice, Zhi, was probably the best simply for the +1 settlement limit, science buildings gaining a small adjacency bonus, and the unlock for the Great Wall unique tile improvement. Later abilities in their civics tree included extra influence on the palace, +5 combat strength on Cho-ko-nus when defending (not what ranged units want to be doing), and +10% science in the capital. Again, decent enough but overshadowed by what many of the other civs get.

The unique civic trees also contain unique social policies known as traditions. They function just like the other policies in terms of getting slotted into the available policy slots, except that they also remain available as options in all future eras and are unavailable to all other civs. This is again a really cool idea and I wish there was more of this in terms of aspects of your prior civ continuing onwards into the next eras. Han China has three traditions available to unlock: +1 influence on science buildings, +1 influence on happiness buildings, and +1 science from specialists. All of them are decent enough without being anything to write home about, with the extra science on specialists being the best of the lot. Other civs get way better stuff here, like the Mayans getting extra science on all forested terrain and on every happiness building, or Maurya having lots of extra happiness on seemingly every type of building. These unique civic trees also contain the unique districts for each nation which Han China doesn't have at all. This was part of the fun of playing a weaker option, of course, making do without the most powerful stuff elsewhere.

Researching the Mysticism civic also unlocked the option to pick a pantheon for my civ. The implementation of religion is pretty sad in Civ7 and the choice of this pantheon is the only aspect of religion whatsoever here in the Ancient era. There are no missionaries or any ways of spreading religion manually in this era, every city simply gets the benefit of your pantheon choice upon building a temple. The general consensus is that Fertility Rites (10% additional growth) is probably the best pantheon at the moment in Civ7, and that one combines very nicely with the innate growth bonus on Confucius as a leader. Unfortunately it had already been taken by an AI leader by the time that I was picking my pantheon so I had to fall back on God of Wisdom instead. This is also an excellent choice as it grants +1 beaker on every completed quarter, i.e. each urban district with two completed buildings inside. This choice was going to scale nicely throughout the rest of the age as I added more cities and filled out more quarters, probably resulting in something like 20-25 beakers/turn eventually. Then your pantheon becomes completely meaningless as soon as the Exploration Age begins and is never heard from again - like I said, religion needs a lot of work in this game.

I met a third AI leader around this point, Trung Trac, who also tends to be pretty warlike but with whom I had good initial relations. Diplomacy was not going well with Amina, as she formally denounced me which caused our relations meter to plummet. The denounce mechanic is an unusual new addition to the diplomacy, as you can pay a hefty chunk of influence (120 in the Ancient era) to prevent the denunciation and stop your relations from going down. I didn't have 120 influence to spare as I was investing it into those research and cultural exchanges to boost my teching rate, and besides, I knew I wouldn't be able to stay peaceful with Amina in the long run. First I'd finish whacking the nearby IPs and then gear up for conflict with her.

This was the spot that I picked out for my third settlement of Jinzi while the embers were still cooling down from the razed remnants of that former independent power. I liked this location because Jinzi could grab two cotton resources immediately (2 food / 2 production yields when slotted into settlements) to help the early snowball accelerate. I had three total cotton resources plus that initial sheep at the capital which were doing a lot of work for my young settlements. Then there were several more resources in the area that Jinzi could pick up with future rural districts; this was clearly another spot that I wanted to be a full city later on. My Chinese civ was looking pretty solid on happiness and I was about to unlock an increase in the settlement cap (currently at 3/3) via that unique Zhi civic, so the plan was to double expand up to 5 total settlements as soon as possible. I was training a settler in Chang'an and planned to do another one after that; hopefully my military units could heal up and then start razing some more of the remaining IPs off to the southeast.

I continued to get various narrative events popping up from time to time that offered a choice between different bonuses. I really wish that Civ7 would tell the player where these come from or how to trigger them, as they always appear to be just random things happening for no reason. One of them granted my leader a Scientific attribute point so let me demonstrate what that looks like:

There are six of these attribute trees and they all look similar to the displayed Scientific one. As the player gains attribute points in each category, they can advance down the associated trees in a fashion similar to the social policies from Civ5. (More rarely there are Wildcard points that can be assigned to any of the six attribute trees.) Some of the attribute points are quite powerful, like getting +15% production towards constructing buildings (which is what most of my cities spend their time doing) or +1 science on each specialist or each quarter. Other attribute options are almost completely useless, and my experience is that the Cultural and Diplomatic trees are fairly weak on the whole. The Economic, Expansionist, and Scientific trees have the best stuff from what I can tell thus far. I had no choice on what to select with this initial Scientific point but I hoped to be able to claim just about everything here before the game was complete.

By Turn 40, I'd been able to disperse the independent power of Jieshi and replace it with two of my own settlements. Eliminating Painted Rock off to the east was also on the agenda once my units managed to finish healing up from their last battles. Handan was intended to be yet another city down the road as the local terrain was too strong to waste on a mere farming town. Those silk resources would go back to the capital and produce extra culture while the gypsum resouce had a big production bonus: +4 production when assigned to a city other than the capital. By way of contrast, Liangzhou was a fishing town that I intended to keep in town status permanently. I'd use it to grab those nearby jade resources and then work only farms and fishing boats for food generation. I therefore made sure to pick nothing but farms for rural districts while expanding over to the jade and salt resources. Woodcutters would be wasted here since the plan was to be a pure farming/fishing locale.

Slightly earlier I had paid 400 gold to convert Jinyang from a town into a city. This cost me 11 gold/turn in income but opened up a new build queue at Jinyang so that it could start constructing its own infrastructure. There's actually a really nasty newcomer trap here in terms of the city building mechanics: towns initially cost nothing in terms of gold and in fact generate more income because their production is coverted into gold. However, this benefit goes away once they are converted to cities, and in fact adding buildings in those cities will cost additional gold and additional happiness. It's very easy to get trapped in a death spiral of negative gold and negative happiness as towns become cities, which loses gold and happiness, and then add their own buildings, which lose more gold and more happiness, and so on. Experienced players will understand how to work around this but it can be absolutely brutal for newer players if they don't know what's going on.

Thus by Turn 50 I had five total settlements, two cities and three towns, while I was saving up enough gold to convert Jinzi into a city as well. I had met the two remaining AI leaders on this starting continent, Himiko and Augustus, who both had to be located somewhere further north where I had a pair of scouts still exploring. I was quite pleased as how much of the map I'd managed to defog thus far thanks to that extra sight range on the scouts and some good luck at dodging hostile barbarians. I made sure to include the ribbons with the other AI leaders in this screenshot so that I could compare how China was doing relative to its peers. It was pretty obvious that I was lapping the field here, with Trung Trac the only one even remotely competitive on science. They were doing a bit better in terms of culture but I already had five settlements and no one else had more than three. Granted, this was only Viceroy difficulty which is well below what I usually play, however it was already getting bad on Turn 50 of the first era and they perform much, MUCH worse in the later eras. Urp!

There's an obvious explanation as to why the AI leaders struggle so badly: the city building mechanics are simply too complex for them to understand.

I had full visibility of Amina's capital city and therefore could do a quick comparison of her city development as compared with mine. Amina's capital was only size 10 as compared with size 18 for Chang'an which meant that I had almost double the completed districts that she did even before considering adjacency bonuses and the like. She had three farms, a couple of woodcutters, and somehow hadn't connected a marble resource yet which was two tiles from her city hall. If I've done the tally correctly, I counted 16 food and 11 production for the enemy capital of Aksum as compared with, ummm, 33 food and 31 production per turn at Chang'an. Now maybe Amina was getting a bit more in the way of yields from assigned resources which I couldn't see here but the overall picture certainly wasn't promising. There were just kind of random buildings strewn about everywhere with no rhyme or reason in comparison with the beautiful urban tapestry that Confucius was weaving in his cities. Is it any wonder that the AI falls apart in Civ7 the longer that the game goes on?

Anyway, so far so good. I'll cover the rest of the Ancient era on the next page as we start looking at the scoring system of legacy points for the first time.