Good afternoon and welcome to the Firaxis livestream, our first livestream of Civilization 7. I'm Pete Murray. I'm going to be your host today, joined by Sarah Engel. Sarah, welcome.
You're our community manager here at Firaxis. I am, and I am so excited to be here today. And we've got awesome members of the Civilization 7 development team with us today.
We have Andrew Fredrickson, the lead producer of Sid Meier's Civilization 7. We also have another Andrew, Dr. Andrew Johnson, our lead historian for Civ 7. Andrew, thanks for coming in. And joining us, the undisputed conqueror of kingdoms, the one who leaves waste all before him, Carl, the Carl Berrian Harrison, designer on Civ 7. Thanks, Pete. Awesome. Well, we've got a great stream for you guys to share today. What I'm excited to tell you is that Civilization 7 is coming out on February 11th on PC and consoles.
Day and date. 2025 that is incredibly cool we have a great stream to show you today we've got leaders and civs to show you we've got a deep dive on antiquity but that is not all we also are gonna be showing you guys a sneak peek into an age transition so moving from antiquity age into the exploration age and not only that we're gonna be showing off a little bit of Ashoka and Moria civ as well we're gonna be taking some time to answer some questions live from chat so definitely ping your questions as you have them And finally, we are super excited to bring back first looks. And the first of our first looks is Hatshepsut.
So absolutely stick around for the end of the stream. All right. Well, we've talked about the antiquity age, and ages are just a huge part of what makes Civilization VII different from previous civilizations. So Andrew Fredrickson, for people who are maybe new to this idea of ages, what do ages bring Civilization VII? Ages bring so much to the franchise.
These are a new way to look at the gameplay, the history, that opens up so many opportunities for what we can do with content and features. And I think that's what we're going to be talking about in the next few years. And, you know, we've divided the game up now into these three distinct ages, and with each one, there's so much to unpack, and we're going to get today to start with the Antiquity Age, the first of those. So, we'll jump, I think, pretty much right into gameplay.
So, we got that up on the screen here. All right. You want to tell people what we're looking at? Yeah, so here we are at the very start of antiquity. We're playing as Augustus of Rome.
We're here on our map. We have our very first unit. And we're going to start up our civilization. and advance a few turns here.
Right, and as a quick disclaimer for everybody watching, just a reminder that this is a work in progress build. Please keep that in mind as we show it off to you. We're excited, but just in case we see any funky visuals, keep. Keep that in mind.
Thanks, guys. Yeah, so our first unit here is what's called a founder. This is different from our traditional settler unit in that it creates a capital city.
All our settler units, which we'll see a little bit later on in the game, now create a town. So the founder is a separate unit from the settler. I think that's actually just a great moment to highlight how many things in this game are both familiar and new at the same time, if you've been playing the franchise for a while. while. You know, the things that you may see when you first start this is you would expect it to make a city.
And like Carl just walked us through, there's some unique differences there. You can see that throughout the entire HUD. We've got our yields in the upper corner, and a lot of those are going to function the way that those of you who played Civ are familiar with.
Some of them are new, and others are like the influence one we're just looking at. Others have changed a little bit, like happiness is going to be something. It's a full yield now, and we're going to get to what that means and how that affects things a little bit later.
a little bit later, but I think that just throughout this stream, we're gonna start covering as many of those details as we can. There's gonna be so much more than what we can talk about. But this is really gonna be a deep dive through all of those. Yeah, absolutely.
And why don't we go ahead and start our capital? Of course, yeah. So I'm gonna settle right here in place. We are sitting on a minor river.
We have two kinds of rivers in Civilization VII. Minor rivers are sort of what people are used to. It runs through the center of the hex like this. And then we have our new Navable. river.
The minor river flows into this navigable river right here, so we're going to settle right at this transition. Fresh water is still important. It gives a happiness bonus to the settlement, so yeah, we're going to settle right on this.
That gives us that happiness bonus, and if we zoom out here, we're able to see that we get all our culture borders around those initial tiles. And we're going to start by choosing production. We have no other units. We've just created the settlement and have nothing else. We can see here that our first two choices are a scout or a warrior, and both of these take only one turn.
And that allows us to pick what unit we want to start with, whether that's a scout or a warrior. It'll finish immediately, and on turn two, we'll have that unit ready to use. So I'm going to go ahead and pick a scout here.
and start exploring the map. Before we go on, I think this is just a great moment to like talk about the fact that we are living in antiquity and I want to give my other Andrew here a moment to just talk about what it means to be in this age and what the whole encapsulation. of that moment in history is.
Yeah, I think for me, when you divide up the gameplay into distinct ages, it allows you to really focus on what's interesting about that point in history, what's interesting about that point in time. And when we look at at antiquity, however you define the time period, we're looking at a point in time when states are not the dominant power, or not the dominant influence in the world. You've got states and you have vast areas which are populated, there are people there, but they're not governed and organized in state formations.
So antiquity is a moment where these kinds of foundations are built. You're building social systems, you're building architecture, you're creating language communities, for instance, you know, Latin and Sanskrit and classical Chinese are these kinds of empire-oriented center, centralized languages that are going to get more complicated when we move on into later periods. So having a focus here in the first stage on that kind of building the groundwork, I think, lets you kind of play with the the dynamics a little bit. Absolutely.
Speaking of building groundwork, let's go ahead and advance the turn and we'll get our first tack. The radiance of the new world came into being bathed in nectar, bathed in love. So here is Gwendolyn Christie reading out our quotes now. For those of you who have played a lot of Civilization, you know that when you unlock a new tech or a new civic, you get a kind of a quote.
And we're really happy to have Gwendolyn Christie reading these. We love Gwendolyn. Absolutely. But. But also what I think we wanted to do with the quotes here is to bring a sense of gravitas back to these quotes.
Sometimes they're directly related to whatever you're researching and sometimes they're more evocative. And also remembering that the story of civilization is not based in one part of the world. It's a global one.
This is from the Priyakan inscription in the Angkor complex in Cambodia. And again, talking about the kind of the new. new growth, birth, something which kind of goes with agriculture and is a bucket of vodka.
All right, Carl, take us away. Sounds good. So, yeah, we've discovered agriculture.
That's our very first technology. You are locked into that at the very first turn. And on turn two here, we're able to select a new technology.
So we're going to open that up. And our choices are sailing, animal husbandry, or... pottery. I think this is a great moment to talk about what you're going to get from these things and the fact that I don't have to make the choice right away.
I get a little bit of time to see what's going on in the world and then I get to choose what I get to do. Tell us why we might choose something. over something else.
Yeah, absolutely. So the techs this time do not unlock tile improvements for us. Instead, it unlocks the yields for those tile improvements.
We're going to see a little bit more about how tile improvements work here in just a moment. But what our initial choice here might be could be informed by the terrain that's around us, the resources that are around us, and what yields we want to try to focus on first. So I see that we have some sheep nearby. I see that we have some cotton nearby. So those are...
pastures and plantations. So we want to try to find those. On pottery, we have plantations and on animal husbandry, we have pastures. I see more sheep than cotton.
So I'm going to pick animal husbandry here to try to get that pasture yield. Awesome. We also have our new choice of production because our Scout finished, and we'll come back to the Scout here in just a moment. I am going to lock in a Warrior as our next unit to build so that we can get that defense. Let me select our Scout.
Before we move him, I think this is a great moment to talk about another one of those changes that can be both subtle but also really important. There's the various terrain types here, and Carl, why don't you talk about how that affects you? affects our movement in here. Yeah, absolutely.
So terrain is different than it has been in the past. We now have these rough tiles here that we can see that have this really rocky look to them. And we have vegetated tiles down here.
Vegetation is actually different by biome. So we have our forest here. But say if you were in a tundra, you would have taiga.
So the type of vegetation that you have does change. And then we have wet tiles. So here, this is marsh, which appears in grassland.
That also changes by biome type. are now turn ending. In previous games in Sub 6 we had these cost a certain amount of movement points from the unit. We can see we still have movement points as a stat on the unit, but rather than each of these terrain types costing a certain number of those points. they end the movement entirely.
I think this is a perfect example of a lot of changes you're going to see in here where we try to take the complexity out but keeping the interest in. Absolutely. And this is actually a really great story that was shared with me where... this idea of the turn moving movement ending was actually came from Sid Meier himself when he was talking about Ed and him were talking about how do we want to adjust things and I noticed though your Scout is moving through this why is that happening easier yeah I said so it's I said it's turn ending but we actually are able to go straight through this because it's a Scout Scouts are able to ignore those terrain rules and they're able to move faster and farther through the terrain which is going to let us explore more of the map but our warrior that we're going to build build, that will have to obey those terrain rules as normal.
I will point out that the minor river is turn ending even for the scout. You can't just cross rivers easily, you do have to spend a turn there to try to get across that. And of course, on navigable rivers, you will embark your unit. So now we have grow city.
This is another one of those things you're talking about where we've changed it from how it works in the past. No more do we have a worker or builder unit. Now when it's time for your settlement to grow, you get to do this growth. city action which brings us into a top-down screen and we're able to select what tile we want to grow into and a tile improvement is automatically placed on the map and our settlement begins working that land. Yeah I think it's just a huge change obviously we'll talk about what the red means a little bit later there's a lot of import there but I think being able to just directly control not just what you get but which direction your city is growing is a huge change for us and again keeping that interesting.
decision clear and at the forefront. Yeah, which direction we grow is actually a huge part of this. When you select one of these tiles, you'll actually culture bomb all unowned tiles around it. So those are acquired by your territory and your borders will expand and you have to grow linearly. So we talked about the sheep resource up here.
We can also see gypsum here. We talked about the cotton down here. If we want these resources, we have to grow directly to them tile by tile and expand our city. out from that city center.
So we have to decide here what resource we want to focus on. We do have another sheep down here. So I want to try to go down here because this cotton is going to give us two food and two production when we pick it up. So I want to go for this first and then later we'll go up and get that the sheep and the gypsum up top. And obviously we see the yield icons too, which, you know, we're going to earn those as soon as we pick it, we get that improvement and we get those yields immediately.
We do. Yes. Although we have have to unlock the improvement tile yield from that tech tree. So picking this will give us a woodcutter, but we have to still unlock our woodcutter yield, which we will do in that tech tree. So here we can see that woodcutter got placed down.
Our borders expanded, and now this cotton is inside our territory. We own it, but we are not working this yet. We do not have the cotton itself. Excellent.
Let's give that scout some more orders. Sounds good. I really love seeing all the variety in the map.
even just for the amount of tiles that are shown right here. I know something that our players have called out, which is really cool to see, is sort of those terrain height differences. Yes.
We can see them right here. I'm not able to move up onto this tile even though I'm next to it because right here, this is a cliff. This is an inland cliff. There is, like you said, a terrain height difference right here, and I have to obey that as I move around the map. It's not a mountain.
This is a mountain right here. But next to it is still this rocky escarpment. that I have to circle around. It becomes really interesting for what that means to explore the map and how my ability to explore changes and grows over time. Absolutely.
And when you have the Scout with a Scout dog and you reach an applicable river, the dogs also embark. They're with you. Don't worry.
We do have a question actually on the Scout dog, which we know is a vital aspect to the Scout. Jared from YouTube asks, Can we change the Scout dogs to cats? Vital info needed.
here uh there there isn't a cat uh that i i can recall right now but there is going to be some uh fun surprises coming for what you can do with different dogs and uh how those are earned and unlocked and uh chosen based on who you are we love the scout dog here too i was having a conversation with ed at gamescom and he was telling me that the cliffs uh and the highland areas actually interact with a rainfall model that underlies the map gen or sieve and that actually feeds into how how the game generates navigable and minor rivers as well too. So it's just a cool way that that interacts with how the world gets built in Civ. So I did a unique action with our scout here.
We have a few new actions with our recon unit. So first we have lookout. This allows us to place a watchtower where the scout is and it increases our sight range by one. It will sleep the unit, so it'll just stay there on that tile acting as that lookout, letting us see more.
of the terrain. This is really great for keeping an eye on enemies or particularly areas of interest. And then we have search.
Search does the same thing. It increases your sight range by one, but this lasts for only one turn, and it reveals all discoveries within the range that you are able to see. Discoveries are our new goody huts, and there's a variety of types of them. We have revealed two with this action.
Over here, we have wreckage, and then And then here, we have ruins. There it is. I was looking for it and it was at the very bottom.
It's ruins. So we're going to grab this wreckage first and then we're going to go over to those ruins and pick that up. Another great example of a change we're going to see right here. Yes. So Andrew, do you want to talk a little bit about what we see here?
So there's, this is the discovery system. Again, this gives you a little bit of a small story that's attached to these places on the map. In addition, there's...
narrative events that may come up based upon certain decisions that you make in the game, certain actions that you make, who you are and who you're playing and how you're playing. So expect a little bit more. I just love getting them because not only are they awesome things to see on the map and make it fun to move around, but it's the, like you were talking about, really enshrining what it means to be in antiquity. These are stories.
These are experiences that people might have had that let me understand what was going on there. And it's got the gameplay choice here for me as well, which Carl, I'm sure, will make the best possible choice. I hope so.
So we do have two choices here. We found a campfire that some soldiers have abandoned, and we can either take the supplies or demolish it. demolish the camp and erect a banner in this location.
That will give us two different yields. If we take the supplies, we will get 50 gold. If we demolish the camp, we will get 50 happiness towards the next celebration.
We'll talk a little bit more about what celebrations are and what they do later on. I think I'm going to take the gold. Early gold is very strong, lets you do a lot of different things.
So I'm going to take those supplies. Speaking of gold, we have a lot of questions from chat asking about economic... victories, how economics work in the game. Can we speak a little bit to that?
Oh boy, that's a big question. It's a big question. I think that we can talk a little bit about it, but the biggest part is going to be a little bit later when we get to talk more about the legacy paths and the victories. But rest assured that the economic gameplay is definitely an area where we've expanded quite a bit and given you a lot of things.
And again, making that gameplay relevant and different for each age. Absolutely. And I think we'll show up.
off a little bit of trading too we're gonna get to some trading we'll get to some uh legacy paths about that as well you want to talk about this quote yeah this is just uh kobayashi's uh it's uh part of a haiku there um that is just uh i i believe it's like i'm not sure exactly but it's the idea of of imagining the perspective of a domestic animal looking outside and seeing what uh what else is out there what other lives are there and also goes along with the era as well. Again, this is a place where in many places it was healthier and more free to be outside of states. And here we are playing the kind of expansion of agriculture and militarism and hierarchy out into the land, kind of forever altering the world. I think one of the things also in terms of like the wreckage bits that you found up there, maybe some other things that you'll discover soon, is that this idea of Those blank spaces on the map are not blank.
We're to imagine that they're also inhabited. They're lived in by people. Other people that are inhabiting the space.
All right. So I think for our next piece of production here, we're going to go ahead and make a granary. The granary will improve our farms, pastures, and plantations. This does put the yield directly onto those tile improvements onto the map itself.
The saw pit will improve camps and woodcutters. We do have a woodcutter right now, but we also have a plantation. And the granary, because it's going to improve pastures, is going to help both the plantation and the the pasture that we put on those sheep.
So I think this is going to be our first building. When we create a building, we create a new urban district. If we are selecting a new tile, each district can hold up to two buildings.
So I could put it into our city center here. We have a palace in the city center, so that's one building. It can hold up to one other building. Let's go ahead and start it so we can show the people what that looks like.
Yeah. So if I select this, we can see where I'm able to place this. I can't place it onto the Navigable River because that is technically a...
water tile and this building does not go on water. If I were to place it into any one of these tiles here, it would create a new urban district. We would then lose access to that land. We can't put any tile improvements there.
Those are on rural tiles only. So when we create a new tile improvement like we did here with the woodcutter and here with the plantation, that creates a rural district that has a tile improvement on it. I think what's great to note is that we see in the different colors here, so we can, like you said, we can expand. expand where we already have.
We can grow to a new area. We can even, if we decided down the road that we wanted to urbanize and take that woodcutter out, we could eventually put buildings here. Probably don't want to do that quite so early, but it is important to note that you can take those things over. Well, and what happens when you take those over is you actually get that population to move someplace else.
So you're telling the people who are working that woodcutter, hey, I need you to go do something else. And then they can go and relocate themselves to a new tile, even a new type. of tile improvement. So I could say go make a farm, go make a pasture. It's a great way to see how you know things are built you know in sequence and layer and as you grow and as your needs change you can change.
Yes. And actually SucreTact from Twitch asks do you lose the tile yields for building an urban district? You lose the natural tile yields.
So natural tile yields do not continue to remain on a tile with an urban district. They go away completely. If I were to build on top of this wood cutter we can see on the this tile tooltip here we have one food and one production and it's notable that that production comes from having discovered animal husbandry that's the woodcutter yield so we unlocked that and now this is giving us that production that would go away we would never have access to that again instead we would have access to the building yields that we're adding here which with this granary is to food I am gonna put this up here and the reason that I'm selecting this particular tile is because buildings and new urban districts function similar similarly to new rural districts, in that they culture bomb surrounding tiles.
And when you add a new rural district, a new tile improvement, you are able to extend it off of any tile that the city already is working. Not just owns, but is working. So that's the urban and the rural districts.
So if I build this here, once it completes, we will then be able to grow directly onto the sheep tile and then directly onto the gypsum tile. And that will allow us to grab those resources faster. There you go.
Just for anybody who's not familiar from Civ VI, the concept of culture bombing is where you expand your borders and it grabs adjacent tiles as well, too. Thank you, Pete. We're all used to calling it that. There's so many terms and changes, it's hard to keep track of what we have to explain. Oh, this is great.
So we met somebody on the map here. Can you pull out a little bit so we can see what we see? So this one, this is a scout.
But this isn't just a barbarian. This isn't just another city. Civ, we've added this increased possibility space to what you find. Like Andrew mentioned, with the discoveries, there's a story there.
It's a lived-in place. These are people who live in this world, and these ones happen to be hostile. We got that red ring around them where we got to watch out for them, but we don't necessarily only have to fight them. These aren't just, like in Civ VI, we had barbarians, and the only way to deal with them was combat. We could fight them, or we could have some other involvement, and I think that Carl Carl's going to try and find where they're from on the map, and then we'll see what some of those additional interactions look like.
And hopefully they won't attack us. Yeah. Well, you've got the warriors now. We do have the warriors, but you know what? I want to keep exploring with the warriors.
So we've got our scout moving to the north. I want to send our warrior to the south, and then we might be able to find some more things down here. We want to try to grab as many of those discoveries as we can.
That'll give us early yield, and that's always a good thing. Speaking of discoveries, I do have a question. from Toms from YouTube. He asks, will Eurekas be in the game? That is a great question.
We do not have Eurekas in the game or inspirations. Those function a little bit differently than they have in the past. We still have some of those goals, but we don't have them give the boost of science or culture that they have from Civ VI. You'll see that some of the other systems, like with the discovery system and the stories that pop up, pop up. There's a It's a different way to scratch some of that gameplay itch.
Right, a little more like of a narrative kind of approach with some of these discoveries, so to speak, that players will recognize, but it's taken on a new form. So here we have our first civic. Like we are locked into our first tech at the very start of the game with agriculture, our first civic is also locked in with chiefdom it just takes a little bit longer to unlock civics unlock social policies which are a card based system that our veteran players will be familiar with here we get two social policies we have charismatic leader which will give us culture culture, and we have toolmaking, which will give us production and science.
I'm not going to go straight into change policies yet. I'm going to back us out here, and we're going to go to a different screen first. We're going to select what government we want. So if I select what government to choose from, we get these three options, classical republic, despotism, and oligarchy.
Yeah, this is a great chance to talk about another one of those changes where we're still making a government choice, but it's decoupling. coupled from some of the things it was tied to in the past. You see here, we're talking about a celebration, which is something we sort of hinted at a little bit earlier, and this is gonna be a significant change.
The happiness yield, in addition to a few other things, we'll keep talking about that one, coming back to it. But here, your excess happiness is gonna certainly build your civilization to having a celebration when you reach a threshold. And based on what government you have, you're gonna get to choose how do you, what, What happens in your city?
How do your people celebrate? In a classical republic, are you getting the culture? Are you going for the production on wonders? In despotism, is it the science? Are you going for infantry?
So choosing this is really about choosing what you want available to you later as you have those moments. I think we're going with classical republic here. Rome, a classical republic?
Indeed. Shocking. So we got a question from Georgie Antepin on YouTube. And Andrew Frederick, sorry.
Andrew Johnson. Dr. Johnson, this is one for you. Is cultural progression in Civ 7 based on real-life civilization transformations? Cultural progression meaning...
Moving through the culture tree. Oh. In a sense, it sort of is taking, I mean, to get any kind of causality when we're talking about the development or the... We're talking about changes in society. We see more change and alteration and not really a kind of...
kind of evolution, whereas a civics tree and a tech tree and something like Civ has kind of an evolutionary model where things get kind of increasingly something or other. But I think here, instead, we're thinking about the points in that age. If we look at the age as a whole, what are the inflection points within a particular society?
or various societies in there. And especially for civics, we're talking about the development of statecraft, of forms of government, as well as other forms of artistic expression, social life. So here, we're looking at military discipline on one hand, the idea of a professional army. We see this developing some places, Syria in a big way, versus mysticism, which is a little bit more of a general term. for organized religion or the beginnings of organized religion.
But also, what else we got there, Carl? So we have some unique civics. These are unique to Rome. Once you complete chiefdom, you do unlock a civ-unique civics tree.
This has additional abilities for your civ that allow you to continue to power up your civilization's ability as you continue to progress through the age. This is also where you get your unique infrastructure. Here we see Temple of Jupiter and the Basilica, both of which are unique buildings.
for Rome. We get a lot of stuff from this tree. We are going to pick some of these later, but the first thing that I want to do is pick Discipline, because Discipline will give us our Army Commander.
Army Commanders are a brand new unit to Civ 7. We are going to talk more about them here in a moment once we have one to show off, but this will give us our Legatus, and the Legatus is a unique commander for Rome, one of our two unique units, and it does some really cool things. So the earlier we get it, the better. I'm going to... to lock in discipline as our civic choice. I do want to just say, I think it, just to go back to that question you had, I think it is really great to say that we, because of these two trees, it gives us two different ways to look at the history, like about these people and about the world.
And I think that when we're looking at that, that sort of shared civic history for the age, like you said, we see the things that were more common or more generalized, and then we see the things that are very Roman. And those are things where this, the narrative team and the design team work together to find stuff that has such. such an identity that you feel more Rome, when you're picking those things, you get to see what that was at that height in history.
Yeah, and I mean, for Rome-specific questions, Carl has a degree in classics. Classical culture. Classical culture, so I'll defer to Carl.
Thank you. A lot of great things. Yeah, it was great to be able to put that to use to make Rome, to make all the different antiquity civilizations that we have, and it was a lot of fun.
Carl has more depth than just being the barbarian. He has some historical depth. I appreciate you saying that. Like everything around here, there's layers.
There are layers. Exactly. We do have a new narrative choice available, so I'm going to go ahead and click that and we'll see what we have here.
So this is a Roman unique story. So the Senate is in session. The voices are raised in conflict.
A lone senator speaks out against imperial fiat while Augustus'supporters seek to drown him out. So we have a few different choices here. The first two of these will give us a quest.
This is kind of like what I was talking about earlier with the question. about Eurekas and inspirations. So we do still have some of these kinds of goals that can appear.
We can either choose to build three monuments, which will give us culture, or we can choose to have a commander that gets three promotions, and that will give us plus 15% production towards training infantry units, or we can choose to not have a quest and then one of those goals and just back out of this and get 33 gold. And something like this too allows you to kind of role play a little bit too, in that Build three monuments, what does that mean? That means have multiple cities.
Lots of culture. Yeah, well, also spread out, have multiple cities. Yes.
So this can also be thought of as a choice between having a de-centered, more expansive society versus backing down on, doubling down on the army, which is something that Romans generally did not do. Is that right, Carl? I think that it depends on what period of Rome you are looking at.
So you're Augustus. So Augustus is actually really interesting. We do have decoupled civs and leaders this time.
You can have any leader lead any civilization. And Augustus himself, we do not have set up to be a militaristic leader. Augustus is set up to be a militaristic leader.
to be an expansionist leader, and he's all about having lots of towns to support a very strong capital. And that's because Augustus founded the Pax Romana, which is a period of peace around the Mediterranean that lasted around 200 years, and it began with his reign. Not that he didn't do any conquering, but he had this big expansionist period where he had lots of provinces, founded lots of new settlements, and that's the part of Augustus that I wanted to focus on.
Whereas with Rome, Rome is... a conqueror. Rome is a military sieve.
They have some really strong military units. They have this unique army commander. And so when you pair those two things together, you get sort of this really interesting examination of what Rome was over the course of its entire history.
So in a way, this story allows you to kind of pick, okay, what kind of Rome are we focusing? Are we focusing on Republic? Are we focusing on Empire?
Or do we just not care and want money? And that's the third. Exactly.
And... And one of our players asked the question, faculty's intact from Twitch. Are these choices because of playing Augustus or are these choices because of playing Rome?
You're probably better able to answer that than I am. This is going to be playing Augustus. Yeah, this is because you're Augustus.
This story is because you're Augustus. So it's not that the choices are so much. It's that this whole story is Augustus'story. How do you want to lead into that?
Versus if you're Augustus, Even if you were still Rome, but if you had picked a different leader, you would have that leader's story coming up. You might. And sometimes there's combinations.
Sometimes it triggers if you are Augustus and Rome. Sometimes the triggers might be more hidden or complex than just simply you are this or you are that. That's what makes them available and not that it's always guaranteed.
Of course. I want to know what Carl's going to pick. I'm dying here. Yeah, sorry.
So because we are going for discipline as our first civic and we're trying to get that legatus as early as possible. possible. I want to try to go ahead and give it promotions and I think we're going to go with only the strength and loyalty of the army matters. It's right up my alley. Nice, Aaron.
You can give Carl a degree in classics, but the warlord will win in the end. You can take Carl to university. Yeah. All right. All right.
So we have command units. Let's keep moving this scout. Show us more maps. We're trying to get these ruins over here.
It's an exploration. So we're going to move along. And this is another cliff where we can't go straight down. So I'm going to use this opportunity to try to search again.
And we're going to reveal some more land around us and see what other discoveries might be nearby. So no new discoveries besides what we had already revealed. But we do see a path.
We also see a path around if we want to. Do you see a path around now that we didn't have to move all the way over there to see? We're able to see that there are no other independent units, hostile units nearby, no other civilization units nearby.
We have a much better grasp of the lay of the land without having to go move to every single one of those points. Absolutely one of my favorite things to do early on is to start using that ability. And again, you're stopping on that river. Yep, the river ends that movement.
Alright, we met someone. I am Asoki, the great king of the middle of the world, and a great sinner. Alright, right here, we'll sit for just a second and start talking a little bit about our new diplomacy system.
them because there's so much going on here. Some of it you may have picked up, some of it you've seen, but when we meet a leader now, it's not just, hi, this is a high and a little bit about how I want to approach them. And on top of that, you know, we get to talk about our influence here.
So we've got you've always got the ability to have a neutral greeting. That's just sort of the traditional, hey, we've met. But now you can sort of how do I want to approach this leader based on who they are, based on how I'm planning to play this game?
I can decide from the very beginning what foot do we want to start off on? And then I'm going to have to use my influence, which is that new yield for our diplomatic system. That's going to sort of it's an opportunity cost.
I can choose to go this way or that way. But down the road. I'm not going to have that Diplo for other things. So I don't know if we've already got a plane here, Carl, but you're... I feel like Carl's getting a...
Actually, before we jump in, who did we meet? So this is Ashoka, one of the more famous emperors in Indian history and of the Maurya dynasty. And we will see the Maurya is also a playable sieve. and Ashoka here is playing Moriya. These lines here, a lot of these will reflect either actual things that the individual said.
In this case, Ashoka's story, the part of the character that we're leading on is this moment in Ashoka's life where he is engaged in a military campaign, achieves dramatic success and slaughters his enemies and then suddenly realizes that... They've done something wrong. He converts to Buddhism and begins to spread Buddhism all across northern India and attributed his model of kingship is also attributed to parts of Southeast Asia as well though the historicity of that is And we're also gonna show up more of Ashoka in this stream as well, which is exciting I just want to take a moment to call out the awesome soundtrack of the game. I do have a question You've got a lot to say about the soundtrack which is awesome Majestat from YouTube asks will each civilization have their own soundtrack and do they mix together with others as the ages progress?
So maybe we can answer that and then just speak to the soundtrack as a whole as well. Yeah um Every sieve has its own theme, right? And so what we're hearing right now as we meet Moriya, we're hearing Moriya's theme. And I get excited about this one, just because it reflects, it touches upon, you know, other lives that I have. But it's an Indian style music.
It has though within it, it's in Pali is the language here. It's a Buddhist chant. I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dhamma, I take refuge in the Sangha. So it fits so well, a feeling of South Asian Buddhism. That feels very Ashoka to me.
And I think the music for Siddha 6 was fantastic, and I think if you liked that, you will like this as well. Yeah. So Andrew actually got very, posted a really wonderful message in our internal message board the other day.
day thanking the music team for their work on this and sharing that story with with everybody so that's part of the fun of working on a civ game is you know seeing people's connection to it kind of get excited in the course of this all right carl go ahead and make your choice so we'll we'll move on from here i do before i also you're going to point something out too but i also want to call out to our art team the you know just the experience of being able to see the two leaders together and as we go through you'll you'll get to see the reaction as carl decides uh how he feels about Ashoka, or at least how his Augustus feels about Ashoka. We get to see that play out from both of them. Sure, yeah. I...
I am actually going to pick friendly greeting here and that's because I want us to show off some of the diplomacy options that we have in the game and by picking friendly we might be able to foster that relationship some show what we can do with influence we'll have other opportunities to attack people. I'm not worried about that. So we're going to start with friendly greeting and see what that does.
Spending a little bit of our influence yield to do so. He's breaking character. It's Augustus, not Carlos.
So now we're taken into our department. diplomacy screen with Ashoka. So we can do open borders, we can do our normal denounce military presence when they're near our borders.
We have a series of endeavors here, and these are unlocked by the leader that we're playing and the attributes that they have. We'll talk more about attributes later on. Right now we can do cultural exchange, and this will grant additional culture to each leader. I'm the one proposing it, so if he just accepts it, I'll get four culture per turn, and Ashoka will get two culture. per turn.
He can also choose to support it, which forces him to spend some influence and say, hey this is something we want to do together, we're gonna do this in the spirit of cooperation. That increases the yield for both leaders, so we'll both get six culture per turn, and that'll last for ten turns. He can also choose to reject this, and he has to spend influence in order to do that.
Accepting is the only option that is free. If he rejects it, it hurts our relationship, and I don't get anything. Neither one of us gets anything.
And I think this is a great moment to highlight that our diplomatic system, in addition to having the new yield, is much more about these actions, these endeavors and sanctions, and pushing my relationship with the leaders up or down, or capitalizing on the relationship that I've already built. It's not just a deal table. We don't have a deal table where you're just passing resources or money back and forth.
This is much more about the dynamic interactions between the two of them. And this list of actions is going to expand as you research more. It will expand.
expand and we have some other things down at the bottom here that we're gonna take a look at later on we're gonna start with this cultural exchange and see whether he accepts it supports it or rejects it so he's supported he spent influence in order to support it and we both are now getting six culture per turn which will update on our top bar yields here in a moment and we got a quick question from Chad H vector asks does the influence get refunded if the other side refuses the offer I believe so So, I do not specifically recall off the top of my head. I believe that's correct. I believe that's correct. I believe you get your influence back. You do not, however, get their influence.
So when they spend influence to reject it, you don't get that, but you do get what you spent refunded. So, the other thing that doing a friendly relationship greeting with Ashoka did is it revealed his capital to us. So if we pan up here on the map, we are able to see.
able to see that settlement location now and we have an idea of where they are on the map. And that revealed both capitals. So now he has this same visibility on us and knows where we are on the map.
Excellent. We'll be able to show more of the different architecture of another civilization when we load into a later save. Yes. So Carl, what do you think?
Do you think we should load into that later save and see the end of Antiquity? Yeah, I think it's a decent time to do that. I saw you put down the farm there. I think the animations... are so cool.
There's always something going on, you know? Yeah. Your founder's goat is jumping around and the chickens are flapping.
And we get to see some of those military unit animations when we get back. I know we're really excited to see exactly how commanders manage to pack armies in. Contrary to some popular belief, it is not, in fact, ingesting them and carrying them around.
Correct. And then when they unpack, they are not physically spitting the units out onto the map. It's more of a deployment. Yeah, it's more of a military strategy, not a... Yeah.
While we're loading into that next save, I know something that our players have been dying to hear more about is just what happens on the other side. of the map right when you start in antiquity what's kind of going on during that fog of war we're we're going to be speaking to a more an exploration but is there anything we can kind of speak yeah that that other side of the map is real and it's there and those civilizations are growing and developing on the very own you won't interact with them directly but because it is the same game world you know they're building what you're going to end up dealing with later or interacting with i should say and they may even beat you out for a wonder i think has happened to carl earlier yeah It can happen, yeah. All right, so here we are at Rome, later on in antiquity.
What are we looking at here? All right, so yeah, we are. Much later on, we have our city built up a lot more. We have a bunch of other settlements around too.
Here we have Rome, the capital. We have walls around a couple of our districts. We do build walls district by district now, urban tile by urban tile. And that adds defenses to that tile, so when you're trying to capture a settlement, you have to occupy each of those defended districts, the districts with walls.
We also have our unique quarter. So when you have a civilization with unique buildings, a civ with unique buildings gets two buildings, you can place those in different tiles if you want to. Each building does have different adjacency yields.
Those are on the buildings themselves now. And so you might want to place the buildings separate to try to maximize the yields that you're getting if you have a particularly good spot for one of them. But if you put them together into the same tile, it creates this unique quarter, and that has an additional effect that is different for every single sieve, is different for every single quarter, and it powers you up in some really interesting and cool way. For Rome, it gives you plus one culture and gold for every single tradition.
which is a special type of social policy that you have equipped in your government. So we have built our forum here. It also adds additional art to the tile, so we have this really cool center plaza section that represents the Roman Forum that gets added to this where we put them both into the same tile here. We have a few other things going on. If we pan around our map, we have some towns.
So we talked about towns earlier. When a settlement settler creates a new settlement it starts as a town towns collect all of the yields around them and any production that they collect gets converted into gold it does not stay as production towns don't produce buildings for themselves instead they can purchase buildings but they can only purchase certain ones not every single building that a city can build is available in a town so we're gonna This is just a great example of finding that fun and the interest. Sometimes you want to get bigger, but you don't necessarily want to manage all those production queues. If you want them, you can convert a town into a city by paying for it. But there's a few other things you can do.
You can actually specialize a town. And with that, you're going to be able to choose a more specific use for the yields. Carl's got one right here.
Yeah, so that was actually a city. I handled the very first thing. I was like, this is a town. That was not a town.
That was a city. This is a town. So when we open this up, we can see that the list of buildings that we have here is different than what was available in that city. So we have a couple different buildings on this.
We can still purchase our units with the gold that we have available. And then this is the focus that we're talking about. So right now, we're dedicated to growing this town.
And once the town has reached seven population, we are able to select a different focus for it. So when we open this up, we can see there's a list of these that... that we can choose from.
Each one has a different effect and allows us to commit this town for the rest of the age to doing one of these things. So when we select farming town for example we'll increase all of the food that this town is producing and that food then goes back to connected cities. We can see that right up here. They send 100% of that food to to all of your other cities allowing your cities to grow and get really tall and tall cities are really interesting.
And we'll take a look at a tall city here in just a moment and see what that means. So let's go ahead and lock that in. This does make this locked for the rest of the age. We can switch it back to growing itself if we want to.
It will continue to grow on its own if we want to have it do that. But I think switching this. And Carl, are those kind of the 160, the hundreds kind of numbers that we saw there, those are turns or gold?
Chat wants clarification. Yes, so that is gold. That is one of those.
in progress build things that you mentioned earlier. So those are gold numbers, it's just using the wrong idea. Got it, and I do have another question from Twitch. Ayerscath asks, at the top left, there seems to be a city icon with it showing one third after we initially founded our capital city. Are we limited in city count?
That is a great question. Oh yeah. I'm about to talk about it. Amazing.
So we'll hold on to that for just a few more moments. We'll come down here, and we're gonna take a look at this unique legatus that we talked about right away early on. We discovered discipline, obviously.
We've got our legatus, and we can see that this has a four on it. That's the level of this commander, which is the number of promotions that it is available to choose. You can bank promotions if you want.
You don't have to choose right away. The level still increases, but we have assigned all of these promotions. We can go ahead and jump in and take a look at what those are.
So when we open our commander promotions, we can see that there's a series of promotion trees for us to pick from. This allows us to specialize our commanders in a variety of different ways. Bastion is all about defense. Assault is all about offense. Logistics is all about different things that your commander is able to do around the map.
Nouver is about moving your commander and your troops. And then leadership is focusing on the commander itself. and making it the best commander it can possibly be. So not necessarily just about leading troops. Some of these are about...
Other things, yeah. So if we take a look at this leadership tree, the very first one that we've unlocked here is Zeal. So when we station this commander in a district, which is place it there, just have it occupy that district, it'll increase all the yields in that settlement by 5%. So this is more of a peacetime thing.
It's this guy is not necessarily out in the field doing a lot of combat. I have him back at home. This pa...
pairs very well with Bastion, which is why we've put these two together here. And so it's like, if I get attacked, I'm defending really well, and in the meantime, I'm boosting my settlement. I think one thing that's really important for people who may have missed it previously is that your commanders are your only units that gain experience points. So you're not gaining it with every combat or every unit on the map. It's now centralized, so you have less to manage, but at the same time, these bonuses, obviously depending on which one it is, but they...
most of them for the combat affect not the commander, but all the troops around it. They have an area of effect, so you don't have to worry about leveling up one unit and losing it and that one's gone. You can bring reinforcements in, and they will immediately be brought up to speed because they're part of that army that this commander is providing all of their bonuses to. And I saw in chat people asking if you can lose a commander.
You can, which is devastating. You can. You can get it back.
They will respawn. There's a certain amount of time that passes. before the commander will respawn and there is a promotion that decreases the amount of time it takes for your commander to respawn if you want to make your commander really good that's the way to go for it but yeah you want to target those commanders first when you see them out in the field particularly if that level number is really high because it means that they are buffing all of those units around them and they're a big threat so if you if you off those commanders if you defeat them it weakens everything else around them so here we can see a really good example of that the first bastion promotion steadfast gives a plus two combat strength to all land units around the commander when they are defending.
So this does not help my attack. This helps when I get attacked. The command radius at start is one tile. So we can actually see this when we select the commander.
The movement here is a blue outline. The command radius is this white outline. So all units that are in these six hexes around the commander and the center hex itself are all within the command radius. There are ways to increase the command radius so it can go up to two.
And that is very strong. The experience you were talking about collecting, that is also within command radius. So any combat that happens with those units is going to add XP back to that commander.
And I think there's also a great moment while we're looking at this. We can see that UI. We can see not only do we see the commander, we can see the specific units that are packed in there, their health. And on top of that, there's a bunch of new abilities that we see in there. A ton of new abilities.
Yeah, we may not get to talk about all of them, but there's a lot of things where your commander can issue group-wide things or things that they can do while they're packed. That's how they can sort of, we often say vacuum, like suck in all the units around them or they can pack them individually. Or eat them.
No, not eat them. Oh, right, right. They join the army.
It's not an edible thing. So there's a lot you can do, but this is the Legatus, so they have a couple extra special things on top of that. Yeah, absolutely.
So the Legatus, like we said, is unique. to Rome and the thing that makes it unique is as it gains levels, gains promotions, it is able to create settlements and that's sort of representing the fact that Rome, particularly Augustus, at that period of the Roman Empire during the Pax Romana for those 200 years, they settled their veteran soldiers into provincial territories and created new towns, new locations, and they settled those veteran soldiers out. That was the prime promise for their service was farmable land later on, and that is represented here with the Legatus. So as they gain experience, as their troops have done lots of fighting, they can then settle those troops and create a new town. So here we can see we have a settlement charge on this unit.
You get one settlement charge for every three promotions the Legatus has. This one has four promotions, so we can create a settlement here, which we will do. We get to select which tile that goes on.
put it right here on the Minor River. Because again, fresh water is very important. You do get fresh water if you're adjacent to a navigable river, because you can't settle on that river tile.
But for a minor river, it has to be on the minor river hex, not adjacent to that. So we're gonna put it right here we get that and something has popped up here a milestone has completed So let's talk about what milestones are. Yeah, this is one of those really big changes We talked about earlier about the ages system that now we want to wreck it your progress in each age as well as building towards that grand victory at the end of the final age of that whole campaign and in this one we're moving down the Pax Imperatoria legacy path and if we hop over to that one you see here on this screen we've got the paths there are four paths in every age they're gonna fall into these common families we can hop over and take a look at the economic one in a minute but the one we just unlocked here is Bam. There you go. So now that we're going to get some bonuses, that'll help us develop further.
Yeah. So this track, the legacy path here is to have 12 towns or cities total in your empire, but conquered settlements counts as two. So you can achieve this entirely peacefully.
Rome is actually really, really good at that. They can have all of these different settlements out there and just create it peacefully. But conquering does count double if you take somebody else's. And then you gain progress as you advance in step. steps down this track.
So we've hit this very first step. This does increase age progression. We'll talk about that meter once we return to the main map here in a second. And then we get some initial rewards. So we get a militaristic legacy point.
We get two options in the next age, legacy options. And we'll show what those are when we do our age transition. So we get an option to get a military attribute point or an expansionist attribute point. When we continue to progress, we get additional additional benefits. So even more legacy options will unlock more points to spend on those.
And then if we complete this path, we get a golden age and that golden age unlocks a golden legacy option in the next age. Only one of those can be selected per age. If you, if you were to complete multiple golden ages. And again, we'll take a look at that later.
Um, and you get these, all of the rewards from what you've done previously. Yeah. So, so they're helping you in the next stage and they're also going to help you in the final age with cleaning.
that ultimate victory because the more you've invested in any particular legacy over the course of your campaign you're going to have various bonuses to do things faster towards your victory in that final age so it's uh it's an opportunity to progress on many different paths you can pivot your legacy from uh the one that you want to prioritize in one age or the next but you may also choose to double down so it's a really a nice strategic option for where am i going and they're all geared towards that age right right this stuff is going to be different in subsequent ages. These legacy paths are specific to antiquity. Yeah, exactly. Codices in my empire is incredibly important in the antiquity age.
That's when these, like you talked about earlier, there was a lot of stuff being explored and written that were enshrining it. In different ages, we're going to care about different things. And this one built silk roads, very evocative of antiquity of people bringing those resources across. across, getting those resources assigned to my settlements. And so this is going to be a completely different one.
Hopefully we, I don't know if we'll talk about it yet or not, or maybe in the future, but one of my favorites is our exploration economic victory. It's a very different gameplay. So we have a lot of questions coming in about religion and how religion plays on this. And I know we're going to talk about it a little bit later on the stream, but do you want to touch about how?
So in antiquity, we do have pantheons and we are going to show those off later on. And religion itself does. make an appearance in the game, it's featured more heavily in the exploration age. And as we said, the legacy paths do change by age, so what these look like in exploration are different. But we'll dive into the details on all of that, I think, at a later time.
And I think one of the reasons why religion plays more of a role in exploration is because this kind of fits more the historical model. Whereas in what we normally think of as the antiquity era, many of the world religions that we know now were founded, some were still yet to come about. They became such a large and grand political force.
When you think about the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages or the expansion of the Caliphates in the Middle Ages as well, this is a story for a later time. time. All right, so I promised that we would get back to this settlement limit question, and we're going to do that right now because we saw in the legacy path that in order to win the military legacy, you have to have 12 settlements. Captured settlements count double, but if you were to do this completely naturally without capturing anything, as I said, you can do.
It is possible even though you have a settlement limit. We can see up here we are now, after settling this town, we are now at six. out of five settlement limit.
We have exceeded our settlement limit. This is a soft limit. You can have any number of cities that you want to. As much space as there is on the map, you can only settle.
You have to have three tiles in between each settlement, so you can't be right up, you know, two tiles away from something else, just like in Civ VI. You have to maintain that distance, but as much space as there is, you can have as many settlements as you want. For every single settlement that you exceed your limit, as we can see right here, You do get a minus five happiness penalty in all your settlements.
Settlement happiness is tracked individually. So we can see here that this settlement is now unhappy. But if we look at some of our others, they might still be happy. And we can see that our total happiness yield is still positive.
So we have some wiggle room. This settlement might not be doing so great, but our empire is still doing fine. And as we said before, this happiness, total happiness number is...
being deposited towards our celebrations. We want to try to maintain that. That'll get us, that's how we get more social policy slots, is every celebration you unlock, you get a new social policy slot. In addition to choosing the bonus of how you want to celebrate. In addition to the celebration, yeah, exactly.
So there's both the temporary bonus of the celebration itself and then the unlocking that you can use that policy however you want to as you go throughout the rest of the age. Yes. So what happens here is...
The settlement limit we can exceed, we are penalizing ourselves, but we are adding all of the tiles that this settlement is going to gain, all of the yields that that's going, still goes into our empire. That still matters, it's still helpful. What we do have is a difference between wide versus tall gameplay as a result, and that means something different in Civ 7. You can have a wide empire within your settlement limit, you can have a wide empire that greatly exceeds your settlement limit. You can have a tall empire that exceeds your settlement limit. Tall really here is about having those towns that are feeding a couple of cities, and that comes down to specialists, which we're going to see here.
Well, let's do this through, and we've got to start taking over a city. We will take over a city here. So we have this growth event, and we have unlocked the ability to add specialists. Earlier, our urban tiles were red, and you said we're going to come back to that. Now they are blue because we can place a specialist.
And when we place a specialist down... It adds a base of two science and two culture with a penalty of two food and two happiness. So this is a great way to, if I don't want to go wide or if I've gone as wide as I can, I can enhance my yields either in a different direction or without necessarily needing more territory. Yes. And the more towns you have, the more food is being funneled into your cities, the taller that they will become.
Excellent. Well, let's get out to that combat here. So we'll go ahead and plop this down on the one that has the most yields.
They're getting some bonuses. They are getting bonuses. From your adjacencies and wonders.
Yeah, they boost your adjacencies. So now that we've placed a specialist, we're going to come up and we are going to start our combat. So up here we are ready to attack Aksum, our neighbor here, led by Amina.
And we have a Legatus with five promotions, five levels, that is ready to start attacking. Yeah, why don't you go through that? We can start talking about this stuff.
A lot of the turn-by-turn combat is going to feel really familiar, but here declaring war is really interesting. You'll notice that we don't have a negative relationship with her, but we can still declare a war. In this case, it's a surprise war. It costs no influence.
But we're going to have some penalties in that combat because of some war weariness, I believe. So we're going to go ahead and declare that surprise war on Amina. So Amina here is speaking Hausa.
She is from the opposite side of the continent as Aksum. Aksum is on the Red Sea and Hausa land is in Nigeria. And she's also...
I did sip for Maximum about a thousand years. But one thing I really do love hearing in sip games is the languages. And so that's the first time I've really heard Hausa. It's always been one of the most exciting parts to hear something that I'd never heard before come to life.
You know, we get so many amazing performers around the world. And getting to see now both leaders interacting with each other, it just brings the whole system to life in a way I haven't felt before when I'm either declaring war or hopefully making friends. Well, Carl's playing, so we know where this is going. going. He's going to attack a commander here and someone who's got a few units packed up but it is a lower level commander so I'm confident in Carl's abilities.
Yeah so it does have a whole bunch of units and we can attack it anyway and the reason we can do that is because these units were able able to move immediately after unpacking. Normally they cannot. I gave this particular commander, this Legatus, a promotion that lets our units move immediately, but the commander's movement is now consumed by unpacking all of these units, and we're going to go ahead and start attacking.
We can see that the combat animations continue to play as this, as the turn progresses and that does matter for the orientation of the units. We do get flanking bonuses from doing attacks like this. And we have defeated this commander that has unpacked. all of the units around it.
These are now injured so they all have damage to their health bars and that's because we defeated the commander that they were packed into. Looks like we've used all of our military ability there for now. We have. So we'll grow another city, get through.
I know a lot of people on chat have been asking about naval combat. That's been a big question and we're definitely gonna get to that more I'm sure in the exploration age. But do we have anything that we can lightly speak to on that?
Yeah, so there is still naval combat. that you can engage in antiquity, but because antiquity was much more about, in a lot of ways, smaller areas, not as much naval power, that was something that we left for the exploration age. So you're gonna be along the coast, you'll have some ships that can can go out there. But most of your confrontations early on are going to be on the land or supported navally. But there's always that surprise attack of seeing a ship you didn't expect coming up a navigable river.
And that can certainly surprise. You can still get your Salamis fix here. I think right now we're very much in a land-based situation.
Yeah, I agree. But a different map, you might see more Galilee symptoms. So we do have a a diplomatic action that was proposed to us here so we get this option to support, accept, or reject as we were discussing earlier and we can see that this either costs us influence to support or to reject but accepting is free.
I like culture, we have plenty of influence to use here so we're going to support this. While we're here over the Egyptian city, let's take a look at what that looks like. We can see that the buildings here are completely different from ours.
The architectural style is different for each sieve. And we also have a lot of other things going on in the city itself. So over here we have the Egyptian quarter.
This is the necropolis. And we have a whole bunch of wonders here in the background. And you can see that she's supported her city with those city walls.
She has, yeah. Yeah. That's excellent. And the last thing we have to do is our merchant. So this goes back to that Silk Roads victory you were talking about before.
Merchants gather trade or gather. resources from other settlements, other city civilization settlements. You can't trade with your own settlements.
And all we're gathering here are those resources. So we're going to pick the city that's within range. These are out of range. The city within range that has the most resources.
That's this one here. And we can see we have a limit of trade routes to the different ones. So, yes, obviously Ashoka, we've got two.
We already have one in progress, but we have a second one we can do in this one because we've advanced our relationship. We could trade with a Shepset or we could trade with a Shepset. we could trade with one of those independent powers. So Carl has selected to see where they are on the map because we now have to move our merchant to that location and build the trade route from there. Once we get them there, it's an immediate connection, but it's this really interesting thing where now it's not just about the merchant going there automatically.
It's much more about me watching. It can be about watching the merchant. You could have people attack and not let you get access to those resources by taking out the merchants before they even get to an opponent city and once the trader is established you can still pillage it if you're at work exactly why don't we take a quick moment to now that we've accessed those resources actually we haven't got we haven't gotten there yet yeah I just want can you can you take us over to the the unit there the elephant oh yes so there's I what I really like as well as just how how different a lot of the units look from each other you know this is a The the the settler for for Moria, you know your Roman settler looks very different. That's a great We have a lot, our unit team has done an incredible job of not only do we have the cultural variety in our city sets and our unique units, we also have just varied units. It may be the same warrior in one Civ and another, but it's going to look different.
And I think it's just exciting to see that all come to life. Not only was that the unique settler for Maria, but we were also able to see there that the... I'm going to go ahead and put it down a barracks here. We were also able to see that that unit got attacked and it defended itself. I think it was a naval attack.
It was a naval attack, but the unit had its own health bar. Here's that, not war-weariness, there it is. War-weariness, as you mentioned earlier, that's because we had a surprise war.
But that settler unit defended itself. Settlers no longer need to be escorted. They now have a defensive strength.
They can attack, but they can defend. And so they are not instantly captured when they're attacked by a hostile unit. Instead, they have a health bar and can be defeated. So I have our Legatus here and I have a bunch of units around it and we're going to use one of these unique actions down here. So we have a couple of different things.
These are orders for groups of units. This allows you to use your commander. to manage your field of units much more efficiently and there are bonuses for doing so.
It consumes the commander's movement and any units that execute the order consume their movement if not all units get to participate in the order. in the order their movement is not consumed. So an example of that, I'm going to have all of my range units do a focus fire on this warrior up here.
They will get a plus one combat strength to each unit that participates. If the warrior is defeated with, say, one archer attack and the other one doesn't get to attack, that archer will still have his unit movement available and can still do an attack normally. Excellent. I'm going to have to do a focus fire on this one. And we see the commander gaining XP.
Yep. TheSexyGamer from YouTube, by the way, asks if commanders have replaced great generals. They have.
Yes. But they're so much cooler. They are way...
But they're so much cooler. They do have similar abilities. to some great general abilities.
We're not going to go into what those are at this time, but they do have some things that overlap that function. Now Carl, did you enhance that commander's radius or did you forget to move him forward? I forgot to move him forward, you're right. Come on Carl.
This was suboptimal play on my part. I am being distracted with questions and talking. That is fair.
So when we founded this settlement down here, we did get a free legion. That's because of one of those civic unlocks that we have from our unique Roman tree. We're going to go ahead and immediately pack this into the commander that we had, create that settlement, and we're going to start moving this guy up.
I had a maneuver promotion in this commander that allows us to ignore the movement-ending terrain. So we can... can move all the way up here and we can watch this commander march and you can see all of the units that are packed into that commander so here we have a legion a legion and an archer this changes dynamically based on the units that are packed in there and you're able to assess the size of a force before you engage with it based on the units visually as well as through the UI yeah and that commanders you know the guys to reiterate just taking up one tile yes there are four units here in the run It's a more efficient way to move across the map, both in terms of space as well as, especially with the upgrade that Carl's put on it, in number of turns as well.
Yeah, and when you have a unit packed into a commander, the commander's movement actually increases. So it moves even farther when you are grouped up like that to really encourage you to use them to move efficiently across the map. Now, we've got so many things to talk about in there. We're getting faster as we go.
go I do want to touch on masteries we can see this right here that you know we've got our age specific tech tree that we're looking at obviously we're pretty far in we've unlocked a lot of things here but you see under a few of these texts we have a mastery and that's basically an indicator of the depth that the civilization would go to pursue one particular technology as well as you know unlocking new things I think we got a bug going on right now but But it's letting us develop further in one concept, but it doesn't unlock anything further in the tree. It's just a way of going deeper in that concept, or I could choose to move on. So it's not as many gates without removing the complexity and the choice. Got a promotion.
The question about great generals as well has also gotten our chat just talking about great people in general. Can we kind of speak to how that's taken shape in the game? Great people are now unique to each or to certain civs. So we're able to see that with Egypt.
We do have game guides up on our website, civilization.com. And we can see on there, there's a list of Egyptian. in great people. So great people are no longer a global resource that other civilizations compete with. Oh, this guy is hurting.
We're going to pull that legion back. They're no longer a global resource. Instead, they are...
are on a civ by civ basis. Carl, I really appreciate your ability to eloquently answer questions and fight a war. I do my best, as we have already seen with the position of commander. It doesn't always work out.
It would have been better if you moved that guy up. This war would have gone much better. Well, it's going pretty well so far. Chat said you were just giving them a chance. Yes, you are correct.
This legion is pretty far forward and is very hurt. So we're going to pillage this tile, which will allow us to heal. but just to clarify on the uh great people bit um it's not just egypt that gets unique correct there's some other there are others which ones they are we're which ones they are ready to talk about yeah yes So like, you know, like civs have their own unique great people, do all civs have two buildings unique to them as well? That's been a question from Chad. That's a great question.
The answer is no. Some civilizations have unique buildings, in which case they do have two of them. them and a unique quarter when you combine them. Other civilizations have a unique tile improvement. Now the way that that works is a little bit different from those standard tile improvements like the woodcutter and the farm and the plantations that we've already seen.
Instead, when you have a unique tile improvement, it has to be built on top of an existing tile improvement because you have to have a population there. So you place down your farm, let's say, and then you are able to build your unique tile improvement with production on top of that existing tile improvement replacing it. However, it does not replace that previous tile improvement's yields.
Instead, it just adds to them. And you'll see that in the descriptions for those tile improvements. And then any buildings that you have that enhance it, a warehouse building such as the granary says on it that it adds to farms, that does not get removed either. So if you are building a unique tile improvement on top of a farm, you keep the farm yield, you keep your granary yield, it's just giving you more.
It's additive. It's additive. Yeah. Exactly.
I think I want to make sure we, you know, Carl's flying through pretty quick. I'm sure people are going to pause through and find all the juicy bits that were not quite talking about. I know we want to get this city captured.
Yeah, I'm trying to get through here. We're getting, so this is great. I wanted to get to this real quick. We'll pause just a quick second. This is one of those things I mentioned earlier.
Resources are not traded in diplomacy. We now have this resource management. And this is not only the resources I have from inside my civilization, but those I've gotten by building trade routes with those other civs. And as you can see in here, Carl can maybe... choose where that that salt is going to go because you now actually get to assign them and get the bonuses based on uh where you want that and now that just stacked that so rome's yields went up based on the salt that you put in so you can choose at certain times to move the resources around some are going to get better bonuses in cities or towns or your capital and at the top we saw our empire level resources uh which are going to get affected everywhere um all at once and those don't have to be assigned you just want Once you get them, they're yours as long as you have access to that resource.
Yeah, I think here, too, this gives a certain kind of a feeling of antiquity empire in that you've got a broad hinterland that is bringing in things to create a glorious central capital if you so wish to do that. Yeah, and I think it's to the earlier question about the economic gameplay. We saw how the Silk Roads, getting those resources, getting... Giving me access to all those is very evocative for antiquity.
There's something really exciting on resources. I guess I'm going to hold it so I don't get in trouble. So I guess we're going to keep going through this combat, see if Carl gets there. Maybe on the next turn. Otherwise, I think we're pretty close here.
Pretty close. It's probably about time for us to see what's coming in the next era or the next age. We'll do a jump through age transition.
We've got a few screens to show you what that's like. But right now, before we do that, Carl, you can go. Yeah, so we've unlocked the last unique civic to Rome, which is Sonatas Populosque. Romanus, which is the Senate and people of Rome.
This gives us a series of unique benefits. We get an additional social policy slot. We increase our settlement limit, and we are now back at six out of six.
We will go over that again when we capture the settlement here in a moment. We get tradition. We talked about this momentarily earlier.
Traditions are social policies that are unique to that civilization. We'll see more on that at age transition. I'm actually going to slot this right away. So we'll see that right now here in a second. And our wonder is available in our unique civics tree.
Every civ has an associated wonder. This does appear in either the normal tech tree or the normal civic tree but it also appears in that civs civic tree so they have a different route to it that might allow them to access it earlier or in a different way and then they can start building it earlier and potentially faster. All right unfortunately we're gonna come up against time.
So what would happen if we were were able to capture that city? So if we were able to capture that city it would join our Empire, it would exceed our settlement limit, which is fine, we would get a happiness penalty but that's okay, but we would then control that city. We could choose whether to raise it, which will destroy it over a couple of turns, or we can choose to keep it, and if we were to keep it it then has an occupation penalty and we are able to improve it and build in it as normal.
It becomes a town when we capture it. come we gave the audience the option of keeping or raising the city and most of the audience's chose to burn it to the ground. I think there's one last thing we want to talk about which was the the crisis system which I know there's been a lot of questions around and you saw as Carl loaded us into that later game that the age progress had moved up that happens as we complete our legacy those checkpoints that we looked at yeah it happens as we get through every turn there's a little bit of progress there's a few other things that you can do to sort of move that meter up as it gets pretty high up the crisis system comes online which is uh now you're not just battling your opponents racing for the end becoming the best but the world is now uh set upon you there's there's challenges from outside that you have to react to now depending on what which of the crises comes up and uh what air age you're in and who you're playing as some of them may be a little easier a little harder and you have to decide are we going to power through this or are we going to pivot and try and go around and get something that maybe we weren't planning. So we'll talk more about the crisis system, but it is that extra spice that comes and really makes some increased tension and excitement at the end.
I'm not sure what kind of spice you're used to. I don't handle spice very well. Yeah, apparently.
But yeah, and it's something where, again, we're trying to think about, at the end of the antiquity era, what are the forces? And they may be dramatic upheavals in one way or another. maybe just a change in the fundamental structure of society.
See, Roma up here, you know, what happens with the Western Empire is you get kind of a regional loyalty starts to manifest. Well, no, it's your area of expertise. But the rise of the vernacular as time moves on, the rise of local powers.
Yeah, I mean, there's a whole bunch of different things that happens with the fall of Rome. There's the. There's the outside influences, there's internal corruption.
It got too big to support itself. There's a whole bunch of different factors there that sort of cause its collapse. And as you said, you're sort of battling the rest of the map, the rest of the world. Different challenges arise that force you to make some very difficult decisions. And it's those things that bring us to that transition where the gameplay and the history come together.
And we get to go into the next age. And I think at this point, we're going to probably be able to jump you through that age transition. I think Sarah's got a couple of caveats to give you here.
Yes, yes. So we are showing off the age transition. I will say the age transition shows a lot of information. So we have just covered up a few of those spoilers, but we are going to walk through what that looks like with you all. And this is the moment that we see right now.
This is in-game. The antiquity age has ended. That crisis has been the thing that triggered it narratively, but also defined my gameplay experience. And now we are going to talk about the Now I'm going to get to move on and get to see a screen that's going to walk me through all of the rewards that I unlocked.
And this is giving me, you know, there's a few other tabs in here, which we can probably talk about later. But right now you can see because of that legacy progress that we made, we've earned points. We've unlocked new things that's going to sort of allow us to make the choices and the options that we have.
After we make this choice, we get to go on and make one of the most exciting choices, which is... Who are we going to be? You want to talk a little bit about what we have option-wise here?
You know, we're gonna pick the Normans. That's the one option we have available. At least it's not masked. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, in a normal game, there would be more than just the one option. Right. But, uh, but because of, you know...
secrecy. And this is a great opportunity to talk about the choices that are here and why the choices are here. You know there's a lot of in past games obviously you just played straight through and we didn't we didn't have this choice every time.
we have this choice every single time. This is a spot where you're going to always pick who are we going to become, what are we going to do with it. And in this case we have the Normans. We don't have the Abbasid because you know, it wasn't a natural unlock based on the choices we made and we didn't do the gameplay.
Yeah, and same thing with with Chola as we can see here. So these have a lock icon on them. We're not able to select them.
They are visible to us. We can't pick them because like you said we didn't have anything that they granted them to us. through the gameplay.
But Normans are available, so if we were to select that, we would then come up and see what they have as part of their civilization kit. So let's go ahead and let's take a look at what that Norman selection screen would look like for us. And then, Dr. Johnson, what is the connection between the Normans and the Romans here?
What are we talking about? Yeah, this may sound a little bit surprising if you're really into the nitty-gritty progression of of cultures in Western Europe. It may not be, okay, so Normans are way up there in Northwestern France, and then they take over England, and we think of the Norman Knights, and we think of the Battle of Hastings, being pretty far away from the centers of Roman power. But we're trying to think about links, and not necessarily the anointed successor.
of a place, but rather places that were influenced, inflected by this. I think in, we had the case of London. Yes, so London is a city that was founded by Rome. It was Londinium, and this was a Roman outpost that grew into a Roman town. And there's a lot of different layers of history that happened, like you said, the Normans invade England, they capture London, it becomes a Norman city, and there are History is built in layers, and London has layers to it.
We actually, Ed talks a lot about this. He did a whole presentation at PAX West. We have that video available on our YouTube channel for anybody who's interested in seeing it and learning more details about Ed's vision for that. But it started as Rome. And so even though you mentioned that Normans start in France and then they go to England, and those are different periods in their history, just as I said earlier, we're looking at Rome as a whole and no longer just a single point.
It's... were representing everything in Rome from the Twelve Tables, which is the start of their government, to the Senate and people of Rome. At the end, the Normans were looking at a variety of different things, too.
We have France, we have England, and Rome was in both of those places. That was both part of the Roman Empire. And for the Normans, you know, they are influenced there by Rome via Gaul, via this long chain of historical connections that we're not going to represent, because to do so you'd have like 15 little mini games where suddenly you're playing as Gaul and then you're playing as like Francia and then you're playing as this and this and this and this.
This is... Broad strokes. Yeah, let's just take two points on this chain.
And again, when we talk about the Normans, do we mean Normandy? Do we mean the Vikings who settled in Normandy? Do we mean the Norman Knights and William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings in this era? I think we try to represent a little bit of all of it.
Exactly, yeah. I think we do. Yeah, I think that this is one of those great moments to talk.
Like, I love every time we talk about what civs could lead to what civs. There's so much to unpack within that. There's so much context. There's so much history.
And obviously, history is one of those things that we always want to reflect. We always want to make sure that the choices that you've made in one age lead into the other. And we're going to see some of that when we jump back to gameplay. We'll see the consistencies of what does carry into your exploration civ. Thank you.
that because of the choices because of the gameplay and some of that is the direct gameplay on the map some of it is also just like you said who you were we were Rome so this is one of the possible logical choices um we've got one that's hidden on here that could be a gameplay thing that you could do to unlock this as well you know being Rome is not the only way to unlock the Normans you could do it via gameplay which you're hiding or Greece right oh my gosh that brings us to our super view which is Extreme. Really exciting we are revealing Greece today on stream and we're going to be adding a game guide to the civilization website so definitely check that out. And I know that a lot of people wanted to know a little bit more about the icon in the upper corner I was supposed to to mention that earlier. We're going to talk a little bit more.
There's a lot of exciting player level developments and things that we're going to be able to expand on in future live streams. Yes. All right. Well, we are already holding a little bit of time. along pretty well, but we did want to have a little bit of time to play Asmoria.
So are you ready for that, Carl? I think we need to actually check out Rome in the Exploration Age. Oh yeah, okay. Sounds good. We're all wanting full speed to try and get there.
Yeah, so if we jump back in the game here, we have done our age transition and we have selected Normans. So this is Rome as Augustus transitioned into the Norman civilization in the very first turn of exploration here. And we can see that this is the same Rome that we were just playing as. This is the same city.
It's the same map. We have just moved forward in time. We can even see we've still got the wonders that we built. We have our wonders.
Unique quarters there. Our Roman Forum is still here. Our palace has changed. It's now a Norman palace. Can you push it a little bit more?
Yeah, we can zoom in here. And we can see that the buildings, the population buildings that fill out the districts here have changed architectural style as well. But the...
the other buildings here are those Roman antiquity buildings and those are still present. We get to keep all of this stuff as we move forward. If we look at some of our other settlements up here, we do have the settlements that we captured, all the towns that we founded, those are still here. We're at eight out of eight settlements and we can even see that we have some of the tile improvements that Aksum gets because they had built them while we were still attacking this settlement and we captured that. We get to keep those ourselves and they transition with us.
We still have them in the. exploration age. And our relationships are still here. That's still part of it. It carries forward.
Yeah, and there's a few other things we'll get to go through as we go through the rest of this turn, but it's just like basking in sort of like, oh, this is the same game, right? This is not, I didn't reset. I had a few things sort of change, a few things level out to keep the world interesting and challenging, but at the same time, I won't walk in and be like, wait, what's going on? Or I don't know what this world is. And it goes.
Go ahead. Okay. I think also in looking at any one of these cities, too, you kind of can see the possibilities of history. So you came into Rome via one link.
You came to the Normans via one link. You could have taken a different link in a different way. And I think that is also the case, you know, speaking as a historian here, too, is that when you look back, there is no one destiny to which we are inevitable. move forward nor is there one origin that we come from we are always of multiple places and destined yes for some place uncertain and i think in that uh dynamism of you know the how many things we could be made of we have the age transition choices we do have that there's two last things i'm jumping back jumping back to our gameplay pulling you guys back in here um there are other things besides just the buildings that we have on the map that that do carry forward as part of this transition we can see here is this This is the commander that we had. Our other one is in one of our other settlements here.
Our promoted commanders carry forward. It's no longer the Roman unique one. It's now a basic one because it's not a Roman unique unit, but it has all the promotions.
It's a Norman commander. It's a Norman commander. They don't have a unique commander.
Yeah, but it still has all the promotions that it had. And lastly, we still have those unique traditions that we were talking about earlier. This is part of our Roman identity.
We still have these. We're still able to slot them as our social policies. And this continues to stack as we go. forward.
So as we play through an entire campaign, we're able to layer our civilization choices together to get the infrastructure added together, the traditions added together, and all of those things create a whole new gameplay experience that changes every single time you play. I think it's a great point to call these out because in the last age we had the civics for the antiquity age and we had the Roman civics that we could unlock traditions with. Now we have the exploration civic tree that everyone has the same access to. But now we have the Norman-specific civic tree, so we can unlock Norman traditions to carry forward as we go into the next age. But let's go ahead and do that age transition.
Yeah, so we're going to go ahead and start the exploration age. And at the very beginning, we get to spend those legacy points on the things that we unlocked as part of the legacy paths that we completed in the previous age. So again, all of this is a result of the progress that we had made. And the things that we have available to choose here are because of the choices that we had achieved.
Right, these are those points that we unlocked. Yes. From going through that. So we have our four legacy path points and then we do have one wild point here and we can spend these on a variety of different types of legacy perks.
Here we have our golden age for the culture. We also have our... Golden Age, for the economic legacy path, we completed both of those all the way to the very end.
So this is a great point. Our legacy paths are not exclusive. You can complete multiple. You can pursue as many as you want, and you're not in direct competition with each other. you just want to get as far and as much as you can and now we have more options to choose from which means we can choose to approach the exploration age differently than we maybe could have had we not gotten as many legacy points completed that said you can only have one golden age perk right so we've unlocked two i selected the silk roads one we do not get wonders of the ancient world that is now grayed out as a choice for us and i did see a question from chat regarding golden ages are there dark ages as well is that something we'll see There are Dark Ages as well.
We're not revealing what those details are, but if you do not complete any progress in a Legacy Path, you do get a Dark Age perk that you can choose, which changes your gameplay a significant amount in a really interesting way. Got it. And those are different for every single Legacy Path.
I think one of my favorite things to point out here is just the option to change your capital, which I think is... And that's free. And that's free, yeah.
So you can decide Exploration Age. We'll dive deeper in it in future livestreams. You know... understand why you want to do that but as i you know talked about earlier you've got the idea that there's going to be some more naval gameplay so you might have been a landlocked civilization before or at least land capital and now you say well we're going to move our capital over to the coast because we're going to be people that go out and look across the sea to see what's next and that could be a really big pivot from someone who is maybe focused on uh conquest just within their borders so absolutely and we i just selected that card um or that that perk so as we advance here we can see that we still have Roma, but Roma is no longer a capital. This city has been renamed and our palace is now here.
This is our new capital location. Obviously so much more we could deep dive going through the Exploration Age, but today we're trying to focus on antiquity and age transition. I think we got through that.
We're going to go ahead and jump over and take a look at another antiquity site, antiquity situation. Andrew, you want to tell us who we're going to see? Sure.
We're going Moria now? We are. So now we're going to move back.
We saw Ashoka briefly in our Roman playthrough. Now we're going to be Ashoka here, and we're going to look at Morya, India. And so here is a case where we have a kind of through line, more or less, within India from Morya to Chola to Mughal.
Now, I hesitated a little bit saying through line because... Chola is in a very different part of what is currently India than Moria was, than the Mughals were based. It is only in retrospect that these places kind of come together as a political unity. But...
That said, here we are. This is the capital of Bataliputra here, and we've got what I really like. It may be a minor issue for the audience, but for me, Looking at the palace there, it took so long to try to get good reference and talking back and forth with art to say, well, exactly what were the architectural styles of Mauryan architecture? It's a mixture of guesswork and some reference and some archaeology, but I love the amount of work that goes into a lot of these little things. With antiquity stuff, it's going to sometimes be guesswork.
I think it's a great example too. The palace is incredible, but even just looking at the land around it, the buildings, the population centers where people live, it immediately feels very different than what we had when we were playing as Rome in our other game. Yeah. And we've got Carl exploring the map, finding a couple more of these discoveries, giving us some more choices. I'm not going to damage our unit.
I'm just going to take the happiness here. This is happiness towards a celebration, and speaking of, we have a celebration available to pick. This will give us a new social policy slot, as well as allow us to pick one of these two bonuses that will last for the next 10 turns.
I am going to go ahead and select food because I think we're doing some early unit building still and I don't want to commit to building buildings. And some people probably have noticed but this is turn 13. We are not on turn one in this antiquity game so we already got a few things underway. We did a little bit of exploring as part of that and one of the things that we've Revealed is this amazing navigable river into a series of lakes that is snaking along into the continent here and we're going to continue to explore along this shoreline to see what how far it goes what we can uncover. This is definitely going to be a place that we're going to want to settle as we continue to expand.
This has been the kind of thing that, you know, when I think about the mentality and the mantra we've had of, you know, history is built in layers, I already am already thinking of, yes, I want a city on that. coast so when I get to exploration that may become my capital. Even on a great lake because it's like okay cool I have all the advantages of being in the center of the continent as well as the access to the ocean with my naval power.
Yeah so here we've completed mysticism and this will give us our choice of pantheon and Maria's unique ability is that they get to select two pantheons so we're going to go ahead and do that now. We have a whole list of pantheons here to choose from and we get to pick two of these to keep. Most of these require that the city has an altar in order to benefit from the bonuses so we're going to want to make sure to build our altar in this settlement and that will give us whatever two we pick they both apply to the same altar. There's a ton of different options here. I am going to go with ones that are going to really enhance our on-map yields so I think I'm going to take Goddess of the Harvest which is very similar to what a grand does.
And I am going to take God of the Forest because we also have a lot of vegetated tiles here. These are rainforest tiles because it's a tropical biome. They give science as their biome yield.
And so by picking those and then we build an altar, we will get all of this yield benefit onto the map. And again, these are called out as a warehouse bonus. And as I was saying with unique tile improvements earlier, these do not get removed when you build your unique tile improvement.
So that'll just stay there and continue to stack up. Yeah, I think this is a great moment to call back to what we talked about earlier, that the pantheons is the sort of the representation of the religion ideas that we see in the antiquity age. All right.
Well, unfortunately, we don't have time to go too much farther within that. So we're going to have to take a rest there. So we did get to see a huge slice of antiquity today.
But I do know that we do have some questions from chat that we want to try to answer just a couple if we can. So, yes. Yes, we do have quite a few questions from chat. And just to preface, if we didn't get to every question today, we are going to have more opportunities for questions in the future. Thank you guys so much for leaving the questions for our devs.
I have a few that I've plucked out. The first, I love this question. As devs, how do you pick and choose which civs slash leaders will be in the game? That is, I could probably talk another.
Do we have another live stream worth of time? It is an amazing collaborative process. with our team internally, you know, there is no one way in which we do it.
Sometimes it begins with our narrative team or historians looking at who is important at that time. Sometimes it begins with our designers looking at what is the mechanism that we need to highlight. And we're always looking at the representation, both for portions of the world, for different peoples, for different identities, and working as a large group with all of our partners internally, with our publisher, even sometimes reaching out to external groups to get insights and perspectives that we don't have. So it is just an exciting, long, huge process to go through that I could do another stream on.
Yeah, I think for me, one thing that is important for me, and important for I think civilization as a game, and the essence of civilization, is that it was always global. It was not a story of... you know, Greek, Egypt turns into Greece and Greece turns into, or like, a story of Rome conquering the world.
It was always a, uh... A global perspective, even from the very beginning. And so I think what I sought to bring to things is really looking at, trying to take that perspective and see what are the global forces going on at different points in time, and then also what are the regional forces. So it may be that this or that power is not, you know, influencing everything around the globe, but they really are. groundbreaking or influential within a particular area.
There is no definition of what's important or what's right or what's the best. It is a constant conversation about is it important for the global, is it the region? As you said, I think that's great.
And I think that what's exciting about that process is we're always learning as we go through it. You know, even someone who comes in with, you know, this would be the perfect one because of these reasons, and it's like someone else has another idea, another... just always ping-ponging.
It's frankly just an exciting conversation to be a part of. Yeah, absolutely. And we're definitely excited to show off a lot more of those civilizations and leaders as well.
We've had quite a few questions about this. Can't pin it down to one user, but a lot of our players want to hear more about the AI. That's definitely a hot topic. Hearing about the improvements to AI that have been made. Can we speak to that at all?
And can we also speak a little bit to how the AI makes decisions? during that transition process too. I love how everyone looks right at me. I've never written a line of code for this game.
No, what I can say about that is that, you know, there's been a lot of investment in the AI this time. We have a bigger AI team than we ever have had. We have more people involved and, frankly, more planning around it earlier on in the process. So in a lot of ways, it's an increased investment.
On top of that, there's been a lot of design changes that allow us to do more. allow the AI to focus in on gameplay because we're not talking about the march from the first turn of antiquity to the end with zero change. The AI has clear objectives, just like the player has clear objectives within each age. So we're looking at, you know, clearer problem spaces.
So from sort of a mechanical stance there, that's a great advantage. On top of that, with these pathways, these historical options, as well as the gameplay options, we are allowed to... to give the AI a little bit more direction in some of their choices because, well, if you're this leader, you're more likely to pick this civ because it was a historical connection or a regional connection.
Or because this happened in this age, you've unlocked this, and there's a really good gameplay opportunity for you to take this one. So giving the AI a strong weighting on the choices they make based on those connections has been, at the age transition, has been a really big opportunity that we've... we've tried to capitalize on. That's really awesome. A lot of our players too are wondering about natural disasters, environmental effects.
Can you guys speak to that at all? Yeah, we didn't happen to see any of those really pop up here, but they are back. We do have a wide variety of them. They are gorgeous. The art looks fantastic.
But there's, like I said, a big variety. We have volcanoes. We have storms.
And those, they will pillage things. They will destroy. your buildings, they will damage your units, and then they will deposit a whole bunch of yields on the map. And those are bigger and cooler than they've ever been before, so we're really excited to showcase that.
Mountains smoke a little, don't they? Sometimes. And volcanoes. I saw a specific question.
Have volcanoes made it into the game as well? They are back. Awesome, awesome. So a lot of our players talk about tall versus wide gameplay, right? Do you kind of focus on a small amount of cities and really build them up, or do you kind of expand outward?
I'm getting some specific questions about how many tiles can you expand in a city. We can get into the nitty gritty a little if you're comfortable. Sure. So the number of tiles you can expand is the same as the six. We've not changed the core foundation there.
We have our 33-33-33 rule where we have 33% of the game that's the same, 33% of the game that's new, and 33% of the game that is iteration and updates. So that 33% of the game that's the same, that includes... includes how the core of a city functions, the tiles that it can work, the range of that.
So you're still settling the same distance between each city. There has to be three tiles between each, so four tiles exactly apart. You're still working out to three tiles. You can acquire tiles in your borders farther than that under certain conditions, but you are working the land three tiles out.
If you build a massive urban sprawl and take up all of your urban or all of your rural... districts all of your tile improvements with urban tiles instead you're not going to be producing from the land in that settlement you're going to have to support it with towns that's where that wide versus tall really comes into play here is is that town and city mechanic and then how you're using your specialists yeah I think it's safe to say that you know we've had CIS where one was favored over the other but the team has done an incredible job through those systems like the the city limit that you have the settlement cap putting penalties in place happiness throttling your yields if you're if you're unhappy so I think it's it's safe to say both both are meant to be viable based on the strategies that and how you like to play yeah that's awesome can we speak at all a little bit to the multiplayer experience in civilization and sort of what that looks like especially around the antiquity age yes so I think we're gonna go a lot more into detail into multiplayer later but we we have revealed that we have. How many, what's the player count for Antiquity?
Is it five? I think it's five. It goes up to a standard size map. And you're all on the same landmass. Just as we've seen in the gameplay here today, you're all there.
And that's because later on, the world expands. And that's part of the gameplay now is that the world gets bigger. And we'll go into the details of how that works and why that works at a later date. And I think it's relevant to discuss, though, that there is a very strong... gameplay reason why those numbers are different because the gameplay changes when you talk about you know the lands that are far far away that you maybe aren't playing with in antiquity you know if we there's so much that relies on that part of the game to work in a certain way obviously we got some uh we got some feedback we're listening we want we have some ideas that we're going to look to explore but we definitely want to make sure we deliver that antiquity experience so that everyone in the game is playing the right antiquity experience yes Absolutely.
And then a couple more specific questions, if you don't mind, I'll just go through two. DudeWithBadJokes on Twitch asks, if you kill a settler, does it die? Do you capture the settler? Does it turn into a worker? What happens?
I thought that question might come up. The settler now gets destroyed. You do not capture settlers, and of course there are no builders or workers anymore, so you cannot capture those either. Instead, you're destroying the unit completely. Got it.
And SeanFuzz on YouTube asks, how are roads better? built? I saw that come up as well.
It's a great question. Roads are automatic to a certain range. So if you were to settle really, really far apart, I don't remember that range off the top of my head.
I think it's 10 tiles. But if you settle really far apart, you will not create a road. If you settle within 10 tiles, you will create a road back to your capital.
All roads lead to Rome, as it were. Even if you're not playing as Rome, the road is created to your capital. Then we saw merchants earlier, and we talked about how you move a merchant to a city and... create a trade route there.
If it is a land trade route, it creates a road for that as well. And then the merchant has an ability to create a road. So if you have a settlement that does not have a road in between them, because the road is going to the capital and not to each other, you can use a merchant to create a road there. Got it.
Yeah, there are a lot of very mechanic-specific questions. And one of the things that I just wanted to shout out is, it took us, you know, we had a lot of turns in the antiquity age and we still, you know, feel It feels like there's so much more to reveal. There is. So we have a lot of live streams coming up.
We're going to be diving into the exploration age more as well. But it really just goes to show how full I think these ages feel when you play them as well. Hard to hold us back. What's that? It was hard to hold us back.
We want to keep going. It was. Exactly. Exactly.
Well, I want to thank you guys for taking time from working on the game to come be on the live stream today. So we've been joined today by Andrew Fredrickson, the lead producer of Sid Meier's Civilization 7. Thank you, Pete. the lead historian on Civilization VII, and Carl, he who is crowned with Iron Harrison. I have no recognition or title.
I had to work on that. I feel like I have to work on that, too. Yeah, we've got to step up.
Well, I mean, a good one, not just a work one. Ooh, all right, asking a lot. I want to remind you that you can follow us at Civilization.com. There's gameplay guides posted up there, so after today's stream, for example, we'll be adding the gameplay guide to Greece. That's pretty cool.
Follow us on our social medias. I know. they've been putting them up over the course of the stream at CivGame on civilization, youtube.com slash civilization.
Hopefully the stream will get posted to there. But we've got one more thing to share with you before we go today, right, Sarah? Yes, yes.
And not only that, I want to call out quickly that we have our first developer diary going live on Steam as well. So definitely be sure to check that out. We're going over ages in depth written by Ed Beach. So take a look at that. I also, yes, I'm super excited to reveal reveal our first look of Hatshepsut, which we will show on screen right now.
So the return of the first look videos is going to be fantastic. Hatshepsut's glorious reign bolstered trade, infrastructure, and artistic innovation. Her ambition to create a magnificent, wonder-filled empire is rivaled by few others in history. Tinkerts or Misterrarum? She accomplished it all by taking advantage of the powerful Nile River, a major influence in her leader design.
As Hatshepsut, build your cities. near navigable rivers for a production boost to buildings and wonders. And be sure to trade for resources to turn your empire into a cultural powerhouse. Consider pairing Hatshepsut with her native civ, Egypt, or the exploration age civ, Abbasid, whose cultural and scientific bonuses can amplify the power of your many wonders.
Or choose a different path, all your own. But whatever you build, remember to build something you believe in.