In Civilization VII, Empires Rise and Stereotypes Start to Fall

You awaken on a hexagonal tile. It is the year 4,000 B.C. You can see just a few tiles beyond yours: to the north a desert; to the south a shoreline; to the east, alarmingly, an angry-looking volcano. The tiles beyond are shrouded in shadow. Over the next 6,000 years you will explore tile by tile until you have uncovered the whole globe, expanding your empire, waging war and making peace with your neighbors, inventing hydroelectric dams and space shuttles and nuclear arms.

This is the basic structure of every installment in the turn-based strategy game series Sid Meier’s Civilization since its debut in 1991 (although in the earliest games, the tiles were square). For each iteration, the designers follow a rough formula: One-third of the game’s rules and mechanics are the same as in previous games, one-third are altered, and one-third are new.

Sid Meier’s Civilization VII, which was released on Tuesday for PCs, Macs and consoles, had the designers struggling to contain the new to just one-third. “Right out of the gate we had some big, bold ideas,” said Ed Beach, creative director at Firaxis Games.

One big change is that the new game is split into three distinct “ages” — antiquity, exploration and modern — that have their own dynamics and mechanics. The leader characters are also now fully decoupled from their historically accurate homelands; in Civilization VII, you can make Benjamin Franklin lead Meiji Japan, or put Charlemagne in charge of the Shawnee.

Previous games in the franchise mostly pit heads of state against each other. Civilization VII broadens that choice to leaders with much wider skills.

“No one explores better than Ibn Battuta,” said Dennis Shirk, the executive producer at Firaxis. “No one does diplomacy better than Machiavelli. No one can set up a government better than Confucius.”