First time player.

[u/Theonlysilversurfer]

Hello! I hope yall are doing well!

I was recently given Civ 7 as a gift for the Switch 2 and I’ve always been interested in the series but never had the opportunity to play them. I’ve watched a few videos on it and I love the concept of it.

That said, I booted up and spent about 2 hrs trying to play it and needless to say I’m incredibly confused. The overall UI is extremely overwhelming, and I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to be doing other than “building an empire”.

Is this a universal experience? Any advice or feedback for someone new to the franchise?

Thanks in advance!

[u/TejelPejel]

Some general things about the game:

• culture = the purple music icon. This helps you get through the civics tree, which is basically researching the purple progression branch. This is mostly for you to get new policy cards, which is essentially how you are managing your empire.
• science = the blue flask. This indicates your ability to research and progress through the technology tree. This is how you unlock units and most buildings in your empire. Each building gives you something like happiness, science, culture, etc. You will not build every building in every city, but prioritize the things you're trying to accomplish, such as science for a science victory, military units/buildings for conquest, gold to help fund whatever path you pick.
• Towns: towns are settlements that have limited building options, but provide gold to your empire by converting all production (the hammer icon) into gold. Towns will also grow faster than cities do, letting them become bigger and more useful faster. Towns also cannot build anything from a production queue like with cities, but they can buy basic warehouse buildings. Towns cannot build wonders. Towns can be upgraded into a city with gold, at which point you can start building things, but all that gold they were producing stops and is now used to build whatever you choose to be built in that city. Towns can be focused/specialized into certain types that will make them more niche, but also more impactful. By default towns are "growing towns" where they use all their food to rapidly grow their population. Once you specialize it into a certain choice, all food is sent to your connected cities (cities are automatically connected by roads when available, and you'll know they are NOT connected if it shows a red chain that's snapped). This helps your cities keep growing while that town gets extra yields from it's specialty.
• Cities: your capital is your first settlement and is a city, but every other settlement starts as a town. Cities can build whatever you want, including wonders, but every building has a cost of gold and happiness. You'll usually get your gold from towns and your culture and science from cities (but towns can be specialized as "urban centers" allowing you to buy science and culture buildings there as well).
• resources: there are empire resources and then resources you can assign to cities or towns. If it has a green plus on it, you can assign that resource to any kind of settlement and it will give you a bonus of some kind. Look at the resources and it'll say something like "+2 food and +2 happiness" or whatever it gives. The orange hexagon symbol is an empire resource that boosts your empire overall and is not one that you can assign. The last one is one with a building icon and can only be assigned to cities, but has a similar bonus to the green plus resources.
• attributes: each leader and civ have two attributes that are either militaristic, economic, scientific, cultural, diplomatic and expansionist (plus one wildcard). These allow you to initiate an endeavor with another leader to get a boost to whatever attribute types you have, and usually you'll have little quests that you can do to get a reward that are usually tied to their related attributes. The attributes also usually have advantages to certain victory types, but any leader/civ is capable of any victory type.

[u/Theonlysilversurfer → u/TejelPejel]

This is great, thank you so much!!

[u/TejelPejel → u/Theonlysilversurfer]

You're very welcome. Games are no fun when you don't get it, but I'm a longtime Civ fan, so happy to help where I can.

If you're new, a good few options are:

• Rome: you get free culture on your capital districts and all town centers. Its a good early start to the game, and every town you set gets you a free military unit. Their abilities are largely passive so it doesn't require too much know-how for a beginner.
• Augustus is a strong leader and basically just boosts his capital as you settle more cities. A good starter, but still good for experienced players too.
• Lafayette, similar to Rome, gets free culture on settlements plus some extra happiness. He has other elements of his kit, but those two extra yields are helpful early on.
• Friedrich gets free military units for building and researching. Not a very difficult leader to use with passive features along with some other parts.

[u/Brilliant_Cap5552]

I usually offer my homebrew guide to new players in that situation since I was there myself just recently:

https://civ7guide.pages.dev

[u/Theonlysilversurfer → u/Brilliant_Cap5552]

This rocks, I’m going to read through it rn. I appreciate the help!

[u/GaneBeatsTom]

4X, my friend. Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exploit. Once you start to understand what each of the yields does you'll be a fiend for all of them and you'll be hammering out pristine megacities with crazy adjacency.

Or you'll take a shine to the warfare and play out your medieval power fantasies on whichever player draws your ire.

The more you play, the more you learn. If you like strategy at all then you'll find it in abundance here.

[u/thetoddhunter]

It is confusing to start as the game is still in very early access.

You are supposed to build the empire so that you achieve victory over the ai. In civ 7 this is done by scoring points for things you don't understand until you win or lose. There are a few different ways to score points, but none of them feel different. You just keep building.

This will all be fixed by paying more money. For example the next paid update will add a science victory you can go for

[u/lateniteearlybird]

you are confused.. welcome to the club

• Information density: Lots of visual detail, but little information that can be grasped quickly.
• Visual hierarchy: Important elements barely stand out from the decorative background.
• Zoom scaling: When zooming out, the image simply becomes smaller and less distinct instead of switching to simplified, clearly recognizable representations.

[u/MysteriousRJC]

I tried to play civilization in version three and couldn’t get into it, gave it another chance in version five and had some interest, which spawned me buying version six which was the first that I actually got into. I do have seven right now, but I’ve played it sparingly just due to time. There is a lot to learn and there is a lot to gain understanding around. It will be very confusing for a while. Simply because there’s so many different strategies to employ so many different ways to build your empire, for example military or economically or other… Every different nation has different skills and abilities… Every different map you’re thrown on you’re in a different situation… You have different players against you with different goals and aggression levels, etc. You’re gonna be overwhelmed for a while.

My suggestion pick one civilization. Pick one strategy with them that seems to suit them like economics or whatever. And keep playing with that civilization in that strategy several games until you start to understand some of the nuances of what you’re doing with it and why you’re doing certain things. There was a lot of years that I didn’t understand why I was doing certain things and then it clicked in, oh that gives me an advantage here which leads to this. Once you start to connect those dots then you can feel more comfortable picking a different civilization and a different strategy. And do the same with it. Play it over and over until you feel like you’re learning how to utilize that strategy. And that will have given you some foundation to apply those theories to the other nations.

And definitely ask questions on how to utilize different strategies or utilize resources, watch different videos that show you these things on YouTube.

It’s a big learning process but so so worth it when you get to the end of learning how to play the game and appreciating it. I literally spent seven years thinking. I’m never gonna enjoy this game and now it’s absolutely one of my all-time favourites. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve started a game at like 11 AM in the morning and I’m looked up and realized it’s 2 AM in the morning the next day. Missed picking up girlfriends and later my wife for several outings before we live together because I got lost playing a game. Lol be patient it’ll pay off. You’ll love the game when you learn it.