On February 11, 2025, Civilization 7 has been released to the masses. I wanted to write down some notes for folks about the game to help folks who are thinking about buying it. I’m playing on an M2 MacBook Air (it’s surprising to me how smooth gameplay is).
Loading times: Long load times have been a complaint about almost every Civilization game; that has finally been addressed in Civ7. From opening to game play could be measured in seconds and not minutes. Picking Leaders and Cultures: This new feature is a little weird to me but, interesting nonetheless. You can pick leaders and cultures independent of each other. It’s a little confusing though when you have, for example, a German leader playing as the Egyptian culture. The notifications we’re used to seeing between turns still mention the culture by default and not the leader. It’s hard to keep track of who’s who because the cultures can be changed at any time. Lack of an iPadOS version at launch is disappointing: The game I play the absolute most, across all consoles/devices, is Civilization 6. The reason for that is due to the fact it’s on my iPad Pro and runs great. The touch screen is really the best option for playing Civilization games in my opinion. I’m not the only one to say that the iPad is the ultimate Civ6 playing machine. But, because of the release process, to play it now I have to buy a copy for my Mac/Linux boxes (Steam). To play it on the iPad some time in the future, I’ll have to buy a full copy of the game again for iPadOs. This is a waste. I’m still not good at it: I’m puttering along trying to figure things out but, I am by no means doing well. This is a great thing given I’ve had a very solid formula for winning Civ6 for awhile now.