I love the game civilization. I don’t think any other game has come close to occupying so many hours of my life. You know if you know.

Now, I don’t know if you heard but apparently, they are developing Civilization 7! And… well… I couldn’t help myself. I want to discuss what I want to see in this game. But don’t feel left out. This is MeritFront! Make a rival text and tell us what you want to see too. Let’s annoy the hell out of the game developers and crowd source ideas for civilization 7. Personally, I want to see them make some big design changes.

This will be a list of ideas. Add your own, reorder, do whatever, we will vote on it as rival texts come up.

An extended Nomadic period

This is my favorite idea. I am sure some will hate it, but I love it!

Ok so for most of human history, we were nomadic hunter gathers, but this is not reflected at all in current civ games. What if this period was a part of the game? How would it work? Here is my best go. Obviously, the devils in the details, and I am just some dude, and I’m probably missing some consequences to gameplay.

First imagine the map starting as under snow and glacier. This is the ice age.

You start the game not with settlers but with a moving tribal village. Like a city, this tribal village gains food and production from the land. But the tiles under the tribal village lose value over time and so you are incentivized to keep moving. You are ice age nomadic hunters.

Like a city, you can train units from this tribal village. Basic units like, scouts, hunters, warriors, gatherers. IDK. With these units you will be fighting, trading, and negotiating with other tribal villages.

During this period, you can unlock some basic technologies. For example, perhaps stargazing would allow you to see greyed out parts of the map you have already explored. Perhaps there is early sailing tech (early humans did a lot of sailing). Random other ideas off the top of my head: Hand axes, slings, spears, traps, etc.

Because this was actually a really long period of time, perhaps the map can go through drastic changes. Perhaps it starts mostly covered in ice and snow, and quickly thaws over time. Once the map has thawed to a certain degree, grain crops can grow, and agriculture is possible. At this point I imagine every player gets the option to research “farming” which leads to “cities”.

With this nomadic period, I see no reason why you should pick your civ at the beginning. Why not pick your civ once you have established your first city? This has some cool ramifications. You can pick you civ based on the land that you found. For example, if you are founding your city within a dense rainforest and river system, you can pick Vietnam and recieve all the bonuses that go along with that.

Population level events

I feel like this is one of those suggestions where every game designer rolls their eyes and says, “Yeah it sounds good but how do you actually implement it.” Probably true.

I like the idea of Population-level events. Where the people within your civ act in ways that you have to respond to. I imagine Generally, this all operates around unconrollable units from your civ. civ, that you do not have control over. Here are some ideas.

1. Your people really don’t like another neighboring civ, if this boils over, they will start attacking them. Imagine citizen militia units that you dont control attacking. All this, without your actual troops doing anything. Your population is pushing you to war.

2. Your people really do not like the war, they start peacefully protesting, if this boils over, they start disrupting production.

3. Your people start trading with a civ without your input.

4. Once your research capitalism, Your people start building companies on tiles without your input.

How such ideas are implemented is difficult. You would want visual indicators of these events starting to gather steam. You would also want ways of mitigating or causing these events.

Navigable Rivers and coastlines.

For most of human history trade and transportation occurred along rivers and coastlines, i would love to see this more reflected in civ gameplay. Rivers especially. Perhaps major buffs for travelling along rivers and coastlines with little raft animations, and major debuffs for travelling through hills and forest.

Changeable map - changeable tile yields

In civ 6 I really liked how floods and volcanos changed the tile yields of the areas around them. I feel like this could be extended. Droughts, good summers, mini-ice-ages, locusts, plague, etc. These wide area of effect events really add to the realism… keep doing this!

Different diplomacy

I have no idea how to better the diplomacy system in civ 6. I just know I want diplomacy to be better. My best guess is something to do with your civilizations internal story and propaganda effecting how the people within your civ behave and how other civs behave to you. IDK.

Better AI.

Do it. IDK how. just do it. Currently hardest AI is just given a bunch of bonuses, it doesn't actually effect strategy. Once you get good, The AI system just cannot keep up with you even on the hardest difficulty.

Anyway, that is my wish list for civilization 7. What about you? What do you want to see in civilization 7? Submit a rival text, let’s see what we can come up with.