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Sunday, February 26, 2023

Borders in Civilization VII

In the Civilization games, players attempt to lead a culture's progress from ancient times to the near future. Since Civilization III, the games have drawn borders around your cities to indicate the fluctuating borders of your nation. Generating culture with libraries, works of art, and so on, cause your borders to expand outward. 

Unfortunately, to date the Civilization games have drawn borders using a pretty simple formula: your culture generation slowly fills squares or hexagons out to an arbitrary limit. This method doesn't really reflect the way borders are created in the real world. 

Civilization VII should be released in the next couple of years, and I'm hoping that border generation might be more sophisticated. It would be nice if the game drew borders along natural barriers such as rivers or mountain ranges, in combination with lines of latitude or longitude. Even better, perhaps the developers could add a negotiation element to the game, where you meet with other leaders to determine boundaries in disputed regions. And of course, borders will shift during wars, a mechanic that already exists in the most recent games, but using the imperfect square/hexagon formula. It would be more interesting if borders ebbed and flowed with the tide of combat...

I'd also love to see a way for nations to peacefully merge or break up, as sometimes happens in history. And maybe a one-world government could be a new victory condition as you make borders disappear, one by one...

4 comments:

Totty said...

Sounds like you want the game Communism, not Civilisation.

😁😉

Earl J. Woods said...

I'd absolutely play Sid Meier's Communism! Or Sid Meier's Capitalism. Or Sid Meier's Anarchy, Sid Meier's Fascism, Sid Meier's Technocracy, Sid Meier's Theocracy...

Never for Ever said...

One of the most frustrating things about Civ 6 is that after you have purchased the tiles within direct city control you can't direct which way a city expands. Even if there is a valuable resource in sight the AI might go a completely different direction

Earl J. Woods said...

That's a great point. The ability to choose the tiles when your culture grows enough to gain territory would be a lovely boon.