Interview: Civilization 7 almost scrapped its iconic settler start, but the team couldn’t let it go

Firaxis was as surprised as fans about the Humankind similarities

Firaxis / 2K Games / Take-Two Interactive

There is little else that could make PC players as excited as a new Civilization game and Civ 7’s gameplay reveal at Gamescom 2024 certainly made waves – for many different reasons. During the show, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dennis Shirk, the executive producer of Civilization 7 at Firaxis, to ask him about the iconic franchise’s next entry.

The crowd went absolutely wild for the game at Opening Night Live 2024, but with how many drastic changes Civilization 7 is introducing to the series, the moment of revelation must have had the team nervous at least a little bit, right?

“When you make a game that’s been so iterative for so long, you want to do something that’s brand-new and big – this is the biggest one we ever made. It can be scary,” Shirk says. “Sometimes players just want pepperoni pizza and we’re like, ‘We’re adding some sausage’, and they’re like, ‘We don’t want sausage. Or at least we think that we don’t want sausage.’ So it can be scary to do something like that, to change something that so many people are used to.”

Change, however, was deemed necessary for the series to continue its successful run as one of gaming’s most iconic franchises.

“We didn’t want to make Civilization 6.5,” the producer explains. “People already have Civilization 6 and they play it a lot. They still play 5. They still play 4. Some of them are still playing 3. Ed [Ed Beach, creative director at Firaxis] wanted to do something new with this, because right now I think players have exhausted most of the creativity they can have in a game. In most of the games that we’ve put out, like Civ 6 and all the expansions afterwards, players usually know exactly how they’re going to play something when we show the let’s play, because they understand the strategies.

“So in this one Ed wanted to simulate something new on top of the world that Sid [Sid Meier, creator of the series] built. And in something new such as Ages, the same strategies will not work anymore. They might work in the microcosm within each Age, where you will have some sub-strategies that are familiar to players, but in terms of the long game players will need fresh eyes. They’re going to come in with a new challenge, they’re not just playing another version of Civ 6. It is a risk and we’re excited about it, but we also think that is a new direction that will give players something new to chew on.”

Cities will grow much larger than in previous entries. / Firaxis / 2K Games / Take-Two Interactive

Aside from much-deserved excitement, much of the online discussion following the gameplay reveal was dominated by comparisons to Humankind, Amplitude’s turn-based 4X strategy game from 2021. On the surface, the two games have a lot in common – crucially, the controversial idea that you’re going to switch civilizations during the game. I ask Shirk about the elephant in the room and he has a surprising answer for me.

“This is a tough one,” he says. “I’ll just give you a little bit of history on this whole thing. We had what’s called an ERB, where we go over and present 2K with what we’re doing and for this one it was for inception, showing what Ed proposed we do [for Civ 7], and literally two days before we traveled, Humankind had announced and said what they were doing.” 

This was at Gamescom 2019, for those interested in the timeline.

He continues: “We were like ‘There’s some similarities here.’ And it took Ed a while, but the more information we saw on this, there were some key reasons why what he’s doing is very different from what Humankind is doing, especially in the way we’re handling what Ages mean and what it means to switch to another civilization. What he’s simulating is something very unique based on something in the real world, and we think as players learn more about what we’re doing, those comparisons to what Humankind did are going to be starkly different.”

Even with the little information we have now, it’s clear that Shirk isn’t wrong: Where Humankind lets players mix and match cultures freely, Civilization 7 is keeping things somewhat restricted: As you advance to the Exploration and Modern Ages, your civilization choices will depend on three different things: actual history, your gameplay decisions in the previous epoch, and your leader.

There will always be an option to continue with a civilization that is historically connected to your previous one and some leaders will bring their own choices to the table – we can assume that a civ led by Benjamin Franklin will get access to the United States when reaching the Modern Age. Most intriguing for roleplayers is the decision-based option: If you have tons of horse farms in Antiquity, the game will recognize this as a defining feature of your civ and offer you the choice to become Mongolia in the Exploration Age, which would obviously be a very cohesive decision in the context of that particular game.

Another comparison point making players worried is the city sprawl associated with the system of expansion Civilization 7 will use: Workers are a thing of the past. Instead, players get to build improvements as the city grows. However, fans don’t want to see the entire map covered in the urban hellscape of districts. 

“What we don’t do in this version of Civilization is fill up every empty place on the map with cities.”

Shirk emphasizes that this is not Firaxis’ goal: “We wanted cities to be contiguous: Urban at the core and rolling out at the edges with improvements. So we decided to make it a growth effect. The population increases and you get to add an improvement, but it’s got to be connected to the city. You’re not just cherry-picking tiles and min-maxing. When you put down a new building, you can choose to put it into an existing open spot or build a new urban tile connected to the city. So you’ve got this natural city sprawl that’s happening.”

“As you can imagine, you still have to maintain happiness in your cities at a local level. On top of that, there is only so much growth that you’re going to be allowed to do, because like with Civ 6, you reach a point where growth gets to be harder and harder, the higher the population grows,” he explains. “You’re going to start crashing up against other things. What we don’t do in this version of Civilization is fill up every empty place on the map with cities. We leave open spaces and room to breathe, because we want there to be gameplay opportunities in the wild. Even in the Modern Age, there will be frontiers left to either settle in or for events to happen. New villages, independent powers – we need space for them to appear and grow and for you to have relationships. We don’t want to fill up the whole map with everything. It limits player choice and you don’t have very interesting decisions when the entire map is filled.”

English and Spanish forces fighting over a colony. / Firaxis / 2K Games / Take-Two Interactive

“The choice to make a builder and have three charges and build three improvements Ed didn’t find all that interesting. It was just busy work for the player,” Shirk says.

Somewhat similar to Millennia, new cities begin their life as small towns. Towns start as a food hub, sending their yields back to their mother city, but they’ll have growth events allowing you to build improvements there. You may also spend gold to build structures or units there. As it grows, there will be opportunities to specialize the town, but you can invest gold at any point to transform it into a full-fledged city. “It’s just a way to not have that micro that you would normally do and keep your decisions interesting.”

The newly-introduced settlement limit follows a similar line of logic. “In Civilization 6 you’ve got that V as you go through the game: More decisions, not always interesting,” Shirk admits. “The ideal way to play Civilization 6 is to put cities on every open space on the map and the decisions are not necessarily interesting when you do that. As a player, I typically place four to five cities and that’s my sweetspot. There were artificial mechanics in the past, whether it’s happiness, corruption, or various different things like that going back through the versions of Civ, but rather than abstract it, we’ve simply got a settlement limit, which is the size that you effectively govern your empire.”

“That great moment of discovery you feel in Antiquity? We want you to feel the same in the Exploration Age.”

It’s important to note that this is not a hard cap. “You can go above it, but as a result, those abstract things come into play where your yields start dropping because you’re getting less effective,” Shirk explains. “You can also improve that cap by various civics and stuff like that. You can increase your settlement cap to make a bigger empire. Ultimately, Ed’s goal is to make sure that the decisions you are making in each Age are interesting.”

“That great moment of discovery you feel in Antiquity? We want you to feel the same in the Exploration Age. There is always something new to discover: Some systems leave, new systems come in without overburdening the player,” he summarizes.

Religion has been fairly absent from all the released material so far, but Shirk confirms that it’s there – in a simplified form. “Religion is in the game,” he tells me. “It’s not one of those things that made huge strides, we actually simplified it a little bit in Antiquity. You’re still going to get to push through the process and earn a pantheon, but you don’t go through as many steps to do it. In the Exploration Age, religion is a system that gets introduced. We’ve simplified it, we know that religion has a love-hate relationship with our fans, so we’ve tweaked and redesigned it to be something more interesting and valid in the Civilization 7 world.”

This is by far not the only piece of fan feedback Firaxis took into account: Natural disasters will be “part of the core game” right from the start due to players taking a liking to them. “Volcanoes, flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, all of that stuff is in the game,” Shirk confirms.

Civilization 7 is full of features requested by fans. / Firaxis / 2K Games / Take-Two Interactive

A major change directly inspired by fan feedback concerns rivers – these will be partly navigable in Civilization 7. 

“There is actually verticality to the map now, so rivers always flow outward,” the producer says. “If you’re at the fat part of the river, you can not only use that with units that are embarked, you can also take your galleys up the river. So you can actually bring sailing vessels up the river, which makes it a lot more strategically interesting later in the game if you’re assaulting riverside towns, because you can use ships along with your land units. I’d like to think we gave some love to the naval game by introducing this particular concept.”

According to Shirk, the AI will make use of all the new features and concepts in the game with great effect, thanks to Firaxis’ investments in this area. “We have a team on AI twice the size that we had in Civilization 6,” he states. “We’re very proud of the progress that we’ve made in AI, especially with all of these new gameplay systems to play. It’s playing really effectively right now.”

Before the interview, Shirk dared journalists to take on the Deity AI during the hands-on demo if they wanted to get crushed, so it looks like Firaxis is confident in its capabilities.

“It messed with the storytelling in our heads.”

With so many other turn-based 4X strategy games having been released (or soon releasing) ahead of Civilization 7, one could notice a bit of a trend: Many games did away with starting us off with a single settler. Instead, we mostly get an established town now. I asked Shirk whether Firaxis thought about doing the same or if keeping the iconic settler start was a no-brainer of sorts. Reality, it turns out, was actually quite complicated.

“That’s actually how it was for a while,” he says in reference to starting players off with a city. “We had that debate. The problem is that it touched on that piece of storytelling in your own head, that imagination you have. After we had that in the game for a long time, where it’s just a city, [we asked ourselves] why? Why bother putting that in? It messed with the storytelling in our heads. You come in and you’re like ‘I’ve got a city.’ This isn’t the dawn of man. So we decided to put in what’s called a founder unit. It’s your first thing – it’s just you and the world. We wanted the players to click that button and start your empire. It was an emotional decision. It’s not really for gameplay, but it made such a huge difference to know that it’s the dawn of man when you’re starting your city – this is the dawn of everything.”

While the start remains largely the same, one other aspect underwent an immense change with Civilization 7: Players can mix and match leaders freely with any civilization. You can realize the Roman senate’s worst nightmare and have an Egyptian queen rule the empire, or put Benjamin Franklin in charge of the Mauryan Empire founded in ancient India. Fan division about this change aside, doesn’t that open Pandora’s Box when it comes to balancing the game?

“It’s bigger for testing,” Shirk confirms. “QA is like ‘Whaaaaaat?’ Because the combination numbers [shows upwards gesture]. So lots more automated testing to make sure that we’re covering all our bases.” However, due to civilizations now only existing in a specific Age, “that balance is easier. We can actually make that experience much more impactful, because you’re only playing against civilizations that are balanced at that age, so you don’t have that snowball effect.”

He continues: “There are always going to be balance issues. We take that with a grain of salt. Sometimes things that are slightly imbalanced actually tend to be more fun, right? You don’t want everything to be so vanilla ice cream that it all feels the same. That said, the fans are going to find combinations that are blowouts and, as you know, with our team we’re constantly tweaking and adjusting as we go through. QA cannot find every exploit possible in the game – our fans can. We update our games forever to make sure that they’re getting the best experience.”

Some of Civilization 7’s changes definitely got controversial debates going online, but one aspect of the game was praised overwhelmingly by fans – its visuals.

“Jason Johnson, our art director, actually took what was best about Civilization 6 and what fans loved about Civilization 5,” Shirk explains. “So from Civilization 6 we have this vibrant color palette, its very optimistic worldview, and Civilization 5’s attention to detail and realism, but not so much of the gritty muddiness that it carried with it. He combined that to build a direction that he calls ‘readable realism’. He got a lot of inspiration from these museum pieces you can go and see, these dioramas. [...] We play a lot of tabletop games at the studio and we’ve got some environmental artists that build the most detailed Warhammer and tabletop maps and setups and layouts that we’ve ever seen. Every time he walks through the funzone and sees these things it’s amazing, so he wanted to build something that looks like the most amazing tabletop game.”

Civilization 7 is set to be released on February 6, 2025, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.