Having grown up almost exclusively playing games on consoles, PC games have always had this air of complexity surrounding them that kept me from engaging with them. I would see games like Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, and Sim City in magazines or online and instantly feel overwhelmed by the density of what I was seeing. Compared to the games I was playing at the time, they appeared so sophisticated and intimidating to a newcomer that I inadvertently developed something of an aversion to playing on the platform as a whole.
I would later embrace PC as a platform alongside consoles, but a few genres remained locked away in my mind as being too intensive and unwelcoming for someone who didn’t cut their teeth on them as a kid. 4X strategy games were at the top of that pile, which made me very uncertain how my time with Civilization VII would go. After my first weekend with the game flew by in what felt like an hour or two, it has cured my phobia towards the genre.
Learning to be a leader
From the outside, 4X games looked like all the most complex elements of a large-scale simulation, resource management sim, and turn-based tactics game wrapped into one. Admittedly, having never given one a proper chance before Civilization VII, I just assumed the only way to learn the game was to read a massive tome of instructions and be willing to spend hours of trial and error to understand how everything worked.
I knew Civilization VII would at least provide some form of tutorial, but wasn’t sure how accommodating it would be for someone as green as myself to the entire genre. An FPS game may teach you the basic controls, but it also assumes you understand some basic components that go without saying to anyone who has played them. Every game assumes some level of competency with the basics of how to control it. That is somewhat true for Civilization VII, but it backloads those moments in a way that establishes a more smooth learning curve.
The early hours of Civilization VII are very structured. I was only given one or two tasks to do on each turn, and the game didn’t let me accidentally skip them. I start by learning how to expand my starting city and control a single unit before getting introduced to each of the resources and what role they play. I was never told which way to go or what to invest in early, but the options weren’t overwhelming and the game moved along at a quick enough pace that I didn’t feel like I was making any massive mistakes. I was never presented with a giant spreadsheet of numbers or symbols I was meant to decode as I feared.
I understood 4X games had various win conditions, such as military, science, economic, and cultural, but (excluding military) had no clue as to how to achieve any of them. That was a massive part of where my misconception of these styles of games as being hyper-complex stemmed from. For that reason, I intended for my first game to head toward a military victory since I at least knew how to work toward it on a fundamental level.
Because my Leader and Civilization were geared toward that goal, the game started giving me clear and short-term goals to work towards in pursuit of that. Rather than floundering around just trying to train units, I knew which were the best new technologies to research and to not simply devote all my time to forming an army and attacking every other Leader on sight which would have resulted in crippling my entire economy and growth.
As the turns went on, I noticed a gentle retreat from the game’s guiding hand — like a parent letting go of their child as they find their balance learning to ride a bike. All tutorials end, of course, but Civilization VII doesn’t simply dump everything on you and walk away. Yes, there is the incredibly dense Civilopedia with every mechanic, term, and system to dig through, but the front-facing tutorial intentionally leaves some things for me to discover on my own. Through playing, I was able to start to see the inefficiencies in my city planning over time. By the time my first game reached 100 turns or so, I could look back and see where I made all of my missteps I couldn’t possibly have known at the time. It wasn’t game-ruining, but actually inspired me to want to start my entire game from scratch with the knowledge I’d gained.
The “one more turn” mentality is well-known among 4X faithful but was the last thing I expected to experience for myself, especially on my first attempt with the genre. Thanks to giving me clear direction in the early game, the freedom to puzzle out how the fine details worked on my own, and the guardrails of knowing that I could never miss an opportunity to act on my turn without intentionally doing so, my first hour with Civilization VII ended up lasting my entire Saturday.
Civilization VII doesn’t dumb itself down for a newcomer like myself, but it was able to ease me in and show me that everything I was afraid of in the genre wasn’t so bad when fed to me in a digestible way.
Civilization VII is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, and PC.