The first part of this report concluded with Catherine finally agreeing to end the meaningless war that had dragged on between our civs for nearly 30 turns. It would be one thing if she seemed interested in genuinely fighting against my civ, but for her to issue double denouncements, then declare war, then send a single unit to attack and never anything else? The whole thing was utter lunacy. Anyway, here was an overview of where my building-hating Greeks stood afterwards on Turn 75:
For the curious, yes, I had made sure to group together three hoplites and the free army commander from Discipline civic down at Mykene to meet the threat of a Catherine invasion. They never needed to do any additional fighting beyond taking out that initial sword but I did have some basic preparations ready. The most important development in recent turns had been the ending of that silly war since it removed 6 unhappiness from war weariness in every settlement. I was back to a healthy place in terms of happiness and sitting at 5/5 on the settlement cap, ready to start grabbing more territory in the near future. There was plenty of open space available for the claiming, and I had the intention of pushing further into the interior of the continent since I knew that I could backfill for some of the coastal spots near me at a later date. Miletos was coming along nicely and there was still room for a filler settlement to its east whenever I had the happiness available and no better spot to grab.
In terms of the independent powers, I had defogged essentially the entire starting continent and revealed eight of them in total. One of them had been befriended by Amina at an early date before I had the chance, four of them were already allied with me, and the final three had begun the befriending process and were ticking along towards a full alliance. This was particularly significant when I was able to take a few of the benefits that function on a per-city state basis, like the "gain 5% more gold per city state alliance" option which I was able to claim on Turn 80. These would have been much more ridiculous if I could take advantage of the various building bonuses, like 2 culture on each monument per city state ally, but the various city states abilities were still quite strong even under this variant. The independent powers also turned out to be located in some rather predictable spots; on that note, let's take a closer look at the revealed map:
This is a magnified picture of the minimap since there's no ability in Civ7 to adjust the zoom level while playing or see a global view. I indicated the starting location of the respective civs with red boxes while the city state placements are illustrated with yellow circles. The map generation turned out to be, uh, a bit simplistic. The four players started on the four directional sides of the continent, then the city states were located with four of them in the center of the continent in a box, along with the other four situated in the four corners of the map. There was absolutely no deviation from this pattern; as soon as I found the city states in the northeast and southeast corners, I predicted that there would be two more in the northwest and southwest corners. Sure enough, there they were.
Now recall that I picked the Balanced map option before starting this game which is supposed to produce more fair starting locations for Multiplayer purposes. To some extent, it's silly to complain about predictability when choosing this option. However, the only other alternative was to use the Standard map generation choice, which deliberately crams the other AI empires right on top of the player's starting position in every game. What Civ7 needs is more total options on the setup screen (like, maybe, Pangaea maps or larger map sizes?) so that the player isn't left with so few choices. It's wild to me that so little effort seems to have gone into the map generation and game setup portions of Civ7's gameplay considering how important they are to the overall player experience.
If the reader looks really closely at the previous overview screenshot, they might have noticed that I had empty production queues in all three of my cities. That was a deliberate choice as I was aiming for a trio of wonders and, as previously mentioned, it's better to shoot for them using Shift-Enter production abuse rather than potentially miss them and get nothing. The first wonder to arrive was Mundo Perdido at the capital to take advantage of its equatorial locale. This wonder grants 1 beaker and 1 happiness on tropical tiles at the local city which was nearly all of them for Athenai. I think that it ended up being worth 10 science and 10 happiness which was a solid return given that my capital had nothing more important to build. Argos finished Emile Bell a short time later, a wonder that unlocks a unique food-granting endeavor which I'll discuss in more detail in a minute.
As for Mykene, it was a great place to build the infamous Petra wonder. While not as strong in Civ7 as it was in Civ5 or Civ6, this wonder provides +1 production and +1 gold on each desert tile at the corresponding city. There were more than enough of those to be worthwhile at Mykene and I would end up with some truly beautiful tile yields (for this variant anyway!) after I combined Petra's effects together with some well-placed megaliths. I wanted to combine this together with the Pyramids at Mykene as well, with that wonder having the same +1 production and +1 gold effect only on river tiles instead of desert tiles. Unfortunately, the Pyramids has a strict placement rule of requiring a desert tile next to a navigable river tile which none of my settlements happened to have. A lot of the wonders are like this in Civ7 and it's tough keeping track of their various placement rules and which ones have already been built.
Obviously there should be some kind of screen that summarizes this information instead of forcing the player to do it all by hand. (Seriously, if you happen to miss a wonder popup notification during the one time that it appears, there is currently no way to find out if a wonder has been built short of trying to build it yourself and seeing it not present in a build queue.) This is another place where modders have stepped in to fix the blatant shortcomings of the formal game, adding the pictured wonders screen in one of the various interface mods that I downloaded. This new screen lists what all of the wonders actually do, the placement requirements that each one has, which ones have been finished, and - if the player has vision - which ones are under construction. For example, I had scouted out Amina's capital and therefore I could see that Weiyang Palace was being built. Without this mod, I would have to scan the whole map every turn and note that an enemy city had started the little one-tile wonder building animation, something so user-unfriendly as to be almost impossible.
I'm at the point where I don't even know how I would play Civ7 without having half a dozen interface mods running in the background; the base version of the game lacks an incredible amount of information about what's going on. In any case, this is a really useful addition to the gameplay even though it's also bugged: it says that every city can build every wonder even though it's supposed to only list the ones that meet the terrain requirements. Hopefully the modder will correct that at some point. I'll note that this screen includes a description of what the Emile Bell wonder does, here's a picture of its unique Ginseng Agreement in action:
This endeavor grants food in the capital of the player and the target recipient, 4 food/turn if accepted and 6 food/turn if supported by the other side. While this is pretty bad in a normal game, and was downright atrocious prior to the city growth math changes in Patch 1.2, under this variant having more food in my capital city was a major boon. Anything that I could do to get additional growth in Athenai was appreciated and I certainly didn't lack for influence to spend on endeavors. Amina had somewhat surprisingly become my strongest trading partner thanks to a whole bunch of supported endeavors on both sides and I was pleased to see that she was willing to spend influence to support the Ginseng agreement.
I was also running a perpetual Local Festivals endeavor with Amina as well, proposing another one as soon as the previous one ran out. This is another highly useful endeavor that can grant up to 3 happiness in every city if supported by the other side; that's enough to offset half of the unhappiness penalty from adding another settlement over the cap. The Local Festivals endeavor was a bit less useful in this game because I was running mostly towns instead of cities but it was still quite helpful at Mykene which I had placed away from fresh water. The entire diplomatic system in Civ7 is legitimately interesting and has a lot of cool mechanics, between the use of influence as a diplomatic currency and all of the different types of endeavors. I really, really wish that it had been paired with more polished gameplay elsewhere.
As I drew closer to Turn 100, I found that my civ was really starting to round into form. I was back to expanding again, with seven settlements on the map and soon to go up to nine total settlements which would be enough for the tier 2 Military legacy scoring goal. (I'd have to go to war and capture some settlements to get the tier 3 goal which didn't look to be in the cards for this game.) I had earlier gone up to three cities by paying gold to upgrade my first two towns, however there didn't seem to be any need to do so with the remainder of my settlements. As towns, they innately had a focus that increased their growth by 50% which was handy for pushing to higher population counts. This would also allow me to swap some of them over to Hub Towns in the next era which I knew that I was going to need for additional influence generation. (For some reason towns can't adopt this focus in the Ancient era - why?!)
There also just wasn't any great need for these towns to become cities. The main reason why the player wants towns to become cities is so that they can add their own production queues and start constucting buildings, since all buildings are disallowed in towns aside from the warehouse buildings. But again, my whole variant was not being able to construct buildings! So... what exactly was the advantage of converting towns into cities again? As long as I had enough gold/turn income to cash-rush megaliths and hill forts in the various towns as they grew, there didn't seem to be much of a need to convert them into cities. Better to remain as towns and keep growing at that boosted rate. Megaliths cost 80 production which converted to a 320 gold purchase price at Civ7's normal 1:4 ratio. I was able to connect a gold resource to knock 20% of this cost down to 264 gold, then later I added a second resource to reduce the price down to 228 gold. With my overall income climbing over 200 gold/turn, these unique tile improvements were soon readily available for purchase at each town.
And therefore that's what I did, letting the other six Greek settlements remain as towns while cash-rushing their unique tile improvements to completion. As more and more of the megaliths kept appearing across Greece, my income continued to rise as well thanks to each one getting an additional 1 gold from my memento choice. Many of these tiles also had production on them as well which was converted back into further gold under the town mechanics. By the pictured Turn 100, I was outpacing everyone other than Amina in both gold and culture generation. This was downright incredible given the Deity + no buildings combo and it was only in the realm of science where I was truly stunted. No need to worry there though, as I would magically catch up in tech at the start of the next era, for once being the one to benefit from that ridiculous gameplay element instead of the AI leaders. It would help if these idiots actually expanded rather than letting me outpace all of them - how could none of them have more than six settlements after 100 turns had passed?!
We were getting close to the end of the Ancient era by now and I had to be thinking to at least some degree about the legacy scoring goals. The Science target was completely unavailable as I had only the Palace slot for a codex, with no possibility at all of hitting even the tier 1 goal there. I was going to reach my target of 9/12 settlements in the Military category which would be plenty good enough, and somewhat surprisingly I had managed to build four wonders which would reach the tier 2 Cultural goal as well. For the Economic category, I pride myself on being able to hit the 20 resource requirement in every game and was able to do so again here, with a little assistance from three camel resources helping out. By the end of the era, I would build enough merchants and run enough trade routes to have more than a dozen resources sitting around unused for lack of resource slots. The player is supposed to construct buildings that add more slots to fit in these resources but... yeah.
Here's another fun interface addition from user-made mods: individual city borders. The default Civ7 interface does not distinguish between settlements and once they start to grow together it can be nearly impossible to tell what belongs to which city. This is something else that I wish the developers would simply lift from mods and add directly into the main game because it's so useful to have as an option. In this corner of my empire where Athenai and Argos and Chalkis were growing together, I made the happy discovery that their individual megaliths could gain food adjacency bonuses from rural tiles within the borders of other settlements - excellent! This encouraged me to keep adding rural tiles along their respective shared borders where everyone was gaining additional food from everyone else's tiles. I was legitimately having a blast with the city building here, somehow wringing competitive yields with the Deity AIs out of nothing but rural tiles.
In terms of policies, I was trying to run as many of the options that offer per-settlement benefits as possible. These included Priesthood for +2 gold in all settlements, Clan Networks for +2 food in all settlements, and Rites and Rituals for +2 happiness in all settlements. These were much better than most of the other options and I had stacked up enough celebrations over the course of this game to have five different policy slots available. My town-heavy setup also made the Castes policy's +25% food in towns into a very useful option, and of course I was rotating Xenia in and out of my active policies depending on when I needed to ally with independent powers. This is another area where Civ7 feels a bit half-baked: most of the default policies are mediocre and the whole system feels like a pale reflection of Civ6's powerful policy choices. I wish that this game had more stuff like Serfdom's +2 builder charges or Agoge's +50% production on units, policies from Civ6 where the player really felt their impact and wanted to unlock them on the civics tree. Civ7 has the civ-specific civics and policies which are a fantastic idea, however the non-unique stuff in the main civics tree has been left feeling lackluster.
Eventually I even started to patch things up diplomatically with my lunatic neighbor Catherine. This was the summary of my relations with Cathy over the course of the age, with the -120 relations from her double denouncements and the -30 for our earlier war looming large in the overall tally. (The "declared war" really should have a different label since I did no such thing!) Despite the gigantic -150 sum of those two factors, I had largely offset this penalty with a whole bunch of positive modifiers that had accumulated over time. There was +20 points for the initial friendly greeting and +20 from endeavors, with the endeavors being the most consistent way to improve diplomacy in Civ7. I had something like +60 or +70 with Amina from endeavors because we'd shared so many of them by this point. I also had another +30 diplo points from various trade routes and this is another good way to pull up relations. Finally we also had +60 points from Cathy's leader agenda, since she liked the fact that I wasn't collecting Great Works due to lack of codex slots. The leader agenda is the most difficult part of the system to work around because a whole bunch of the AI leaders have totally insane agendas. It can be done though if there are enough offsetting positives elsewhere.
The net result is that the Civ7 diplomatic system is actually... kind of OK? It took me a long time to understand what was happening because these numbers were buried deep into the interface before Patch 1.2 finally made them easy to find. And the whole diplomacy mechanics are poisoned by the default Standard map setting cramming all of the AI leaders right on top of the player, where it's impossible to avoid the huge "you settled too close to our capital" penalty which then triggers denouncements followed by invasions. When playing on maps that are actually fair though, this setup is honestly not that bad and unquestionably a step up from Civ6's poor diplomatic mechanics. It continues to be frustrating that Civ7 has these individual pieces that are functioning well in isolation, only to be wasted by the larger problems elsewhere in the gameplay.
The era meter advanced more slowly than I'm used to seeing in a Deity game, probably because I wasn't achieving many of the tier 3 scoring goals which do the most to advance the timer. It finally reached its conclusion on Turn 129 after what I could only conclude had been a stunningly successful Ancient era. I had been able to add a megalith or a hill fort on every single rural tile, not a single population growth being left without its own unique tile improvement on top. I had reached the maximum expansion limit that I felt was possible in this era, with 9/7 on the settlement meter, where placing any additional settlements would have started driving my cities into too much unhappiness. I had the most culture in the game and significantly more gold/turn income than anyone else, again nothing short of amazing given these restrictions. I had even finished researching every single civic in the tree and completed Future Civic on the last interturn for an extra Wildcard attribute point in the next era. The future also looked bright for the Exploration age because all of the unique tile improvements are ageless: the AI civs would be losing a whole bunch of their science and culture and gold while everything that I had would remain intact. If there was one small bright spot to this variant, that was surely it.
What saddened me about the Ancient era coming to a close was losing access to those megaliths. The ones that I had would remain in place but I wouldn't be able to construct any further megaliths, and that was unfortunate because there are no food-boosting unique improvements in the Exploration age. Well, there's the Incan civ that has one such unique improvement but it's really terrible and I would be picking a different choice going forward. I honestly just wanted to keep playing the game as it was, not go through this forced era transition yet again. Sigh. 
The era scoring wasn't great as should have been obvious from these variant rules. I fully completed the Economic goal and hit the tier 2 target in both Culture and Military while having absolutely nothing in the Science category. Note that here in the Ancient era, the AI leaders legitimately do well at competing for these scoring goals. All of the four branches are things that the player would be doing anyway and which the AI understands how to chase after. It's the later eras where they fall off a cliff because they have no idea how to get a tile with 40 total yield or collect railroad resources and so on. Again, I cannot stress enough how much better Civ7's gameplay would be if the era transitions did not exist and these legacy scoring goals were removed.
For the Exploration age, there was a clear civ choice that I wanted to try in the form of Bulgaria. This was one of the additional civs added in the first downloadable content drop which I had by virtue of getting the more expensive version of the game at launch. Bulgaria's big draw was the Hidden Fortress unique tile improvement which added +4 production to any rough tile. I could simply replace my hill forts with hidden fortresses for a gain of +2 production, and since there's a mastery tech in the Exploration age that grants +1 production on all mines and quarries, this would be an effective +3 production in practice. The rest of the Bulgarian unique stuff looked to be less useful but that pillaging bonus under Krum's Dynasty could be very nice indeed. I could theoretically pillage my way to further population increases across the board if I found myself embroiled in conflict.
The only thing that I really wanted in terms of the legacy bonuses was Fealty: +2 settlement limit. I regard this as almost mandatory to be competitive when playing on higher difficulty in Civ7 since it makes such a tremendous difference to start the Exploration age with a settlement cap of 10 as opposed to 8. I also went ahead and took the Silk Roads Golden Age option which kept all three of my cities as cities rather than seeing them degrade back into towns. I didn't really need this since I could have retained two of the three as cities by switching my capital, it was more the principle of the thing: cities going back into towns sucks and was an absolutely awful design decision. Otherwise, I grabbed a few Cultural and Economic attribute points and was ready to kick start the new era.
And that's when I discovered something that brought this whole game to a close:
What did they do to my poor cities?! 
After the new era finished loading, I realized to my horror that every single food adjacency bonus from the megaliths had disappeared. Every single one. This completely decimated my whole civilization as I'd been counting on them to provide the food engine for later population growths. Athenai had previously been making 76 food/turn with its megaliths active, and in truth more than that because I'd let the Ginseng agreement lapse when the Ancient era was about to close. The city had been adding new population points every 10-12 turns and growing at a very healthy pace. Now the poor city had been cut all the way down to 32 food/turn and it was going to take a staggering 51 turns (!) to add the next population. All of my other settlements were equally affected by this calamitous removal of the megalith food adjacencies. What made things even worse is that the megalith is specifically an AGELESS tile improvement. They aren't supposed to lose their bonuses during the era transitions! This was therefore either a programing error or a completely undocumented aspect of how the megalith works; I could believe either one of them with Civ7.
I'm reasonably confident that I could play on from this point and probably still work my way to an eventual victory. My gold/turn income was mostly intact and my science and culture rates had indeed pulled over the era transition without decreasing. I had successfully saved up 1700 gold and 500 influence which I could have poured into immediate friendships with the new independent powers once they spawed on the next turn, once again taking advantage of my half cost friendships thanks to Xenia tradition and the earlier attribute points in the Diplomatic tree. The newly increased settlement cap meant that I could add some new settlements on my starting continent or overseas, wherever made the most sense. This was still very much a winnable game.
But... I had completely lost the desire to play further. I can't stress enough that I had spent the entire Ancient era doing all of my building and planning around getting the best tile adjacencies for those megaliths, only to see them lose their entire bonuses due to a completely undocumented mechanic. It was so frustrating that I couldn't summon up any interest in continuing. This variant therefore became the perfect encapsulation of the Civ7 experience: I was having lots of fun, enjoying the Ancient era, and then the era transition absolutely murdered my civ. I will never, ever understand this design decision - why would the developers put in a mechanic that deliberately, unavoidably smashes the empire that you've just built in an empire-building game? Imagine playing chess where halfway through the game someone else grabs the board and moves all the pieces around willy-nilly. Imagine playing Super Mario Brothers where someone else steals the controller, goes to a different level, and switches to completely different powerups before you get control back. Imagine playing Starcraft where you're put in stasis for a few minutes, and when you get the keyboard back you find that half your army is dead, your Hive has been downgraded into a Lair, and all of your upgrades have disappeared. Does any of this sound like fun???
So there you have it, the Civ7 experience in a nutshell. I don't think this game is salvageable unless the developers add a "classic" or "ageless" mode that does away with era transitions and the legacy scoring concept. Unfortunately those mechanics are absolutely core to the gameplay as currently envisioned so I'm not exactly holding my breath. Until then, it's no wonder that Civ6 is pulling 5x the player numbers of Civ7 on Steam and even Civ5 is routinely doubling the player count despite being FIFTEEN years older. What a waste of potential.
