James "Lycerius" Moore spent nearly a decade playing one game of Civilization 2 off and on, pushing it as far into the future as he could. In a 2012 Reddit post, he described the world that resulted as "a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation."

Only three civs were still standing in 3991 AD—the Celts (Lycerius' civ), Vikings, and Americans—and they were in constant conflict over an earth that could barely support human life.

"The ice caps have melted over 20 times (somehow) due primarily to the many nuclear wars," Lycerius wrote. "As a result, every inch of land in the world that isn't a mountain is inundated swamp land, useless to farming. Most of which is irradiated anyway."

Attempts to cooperate with the other nations were futile.

"The three remaining nations have been locked in an eternal death struggle for almost 2,000 years," said Lycerius. "Peace seems to be impossible. Every time a cease fire is signed, the Vikings will surprise attack me or the Americans the very next turn, often with nuclear weapons. Even when the UN forces a peace treaty."

You can still read Lycerius's original Reddit post about the The Eternal War, which spawned a whole subreddit of its own where players loaded his save and attempted to either win the war or negotiate peace, as if it were a chess puzzle. Someone managed to defeat the other civs in 58 in-game years.

In 2012, we published an interview with Lycerius in which he discussed his sudden fame (the story got quite a bit of mainstream attention) and the question of whether Civ 2's projection of the future might have been prescient.

"I think people in general have this morbid curiosity about the world and where it's going, and I think they saw this and just kind of latched on," he said. "You know, it's by no means an accurate simulation of world affairs or anything like that, it's just a game roughly based on such things, but I think it really captured a lot of people's imaginations."

Over a decade later, I'm wondering if maybe Civ 2 was more accurate than we knew.

Meanwhile, Civilization 7 has launched to mostly positive reviews from critics—we said it was good, but not as good as the last two games, in our Civilization 7 review—and "Mixed" reviews from Steam users. I like it, but now that I'm thinking about Civ 2 again, I'm pining a little for the feeling of those older games.

Civ 7 feels more positive overall about humanity's agricultural and industrial revolutions—it omits the effects of climate change, for instance, something I hope is added in an expansion as it was in Civ 6's Gathering Storm. And though it was a little clunky from a political theory perspective, I like that your citizens in Civ 2 could revolt and temporarily replace your government with anarchy, and that corruption and waste were simulated.

If you want to play Civ 2, it's not too hard to find a copy online, but it's not available for sale digitally anywhere. You can still get Civ 3 on Steam and GOG, though. I don't know whether it'd be a fruitful pursuit for Firaxis, or if any copyright snarls would block it, but I'd sure love a lightly remastered collection of Civs 1-4 someday.

As Creative Assembly Sofia's principal technical designer Radoslav Borisov explains, the "query system" the AI was using to determine how it reacted was freaking out if even a single hero was milling about in its territory. All those times you sent a scout to keep an eye on someone you thought was about to invade, only for them to immediately turtle? It was your agent's fault the whole time.

Fixing that bug will mean "an AI controlled faction will no longer immediately assume a defensive posture and concentrate forces near/in settlements whenever any hostile agent ventures into their territory." That should also mean the AI will have more resources to spend on acting offensively instead of concentrating them all defending settlements that aren't actually being threatened.

Two other changes to the AI are being tested on the beta. One is a tweak to aggression that'll make factions more suspicious of anyone they haven't met yet, making them more likely to go to war when they finally encounter each other. The other is a series of tweaks to how factions who are "under the shroud" (yet to be encountered, rather than just hidden by fog of war) react to each other. Major factions are getting a boost, making them more likely to survive and thrive rather than getting randomly wiped out by a minor faction before you even cross paths. No more of that thing where you make it to Sylvania and find out the traditional home of the vampires is randomly full of wood elves.

When the beta launches, Creative Assembly will have details on how to join it on the blog. It's planned to run for two weeks, and the developers note that using mods in conjunction with the beta "will lead to unexpected results", so it's probably best to disable Assladders Begone or whatever else you've got installed if you want to take part.

Firaxis has heard the complaints and is working to address them. The third post-launch patch arrived today, and it "focuses on addressing key areas of player-reported issues that we can act on most quickly," Firaxis says.

The patch, like the one before it, makes some changes to the user interface, which is one of the key complaints players have. Some of it looks to improve readability: there are several changes to font scaling, alignment, spacing, and cut-off descriptions. Some quality of life fixes are also included, like being able to escape out of the independent power screen.

Tooltips have been improved, too, with a nice hat-tip to a modder we mentioned yesterday, Sukritact, who has already made several improvements to Civ 7's interface.

"Added Building icons to the plot tooltip with their status," Firaxis said. "Added Wonder icons to the plot tooltip with the gameplay effect. Made resource icons larger on improved tiles, and smaller on unimproved tiles. 'Thank you for the inspiration Sukritact!'" Nice to get a shout-out from the devs, I imagine.

And this fix sounds kind of important: "Added a notification for when an enemy attacks a player's Unit in single-player." Yeah, that'd be a good event to be tipped off to.

You can read the entire patch list below. There are more fixes on the way, too: "We're still actively working on a development roadmap outlining more major updates to the game, including improvements to the UI and other critical areas," Firaxis says. "Our goal is to share this roadmap in the coming weeks; we appreciate your patience as we determine what we can deliver in the near future."

Full patch notes:

Stability

• General Stability Improvements and fixes.

GameplayWindows PC/Mac/Linux/Steam Deck

• Bombers can now deploy Nuclear Weapons when packed into an Aerodrome, Carrier, or Squadron Commander (previously only Heavy Bombers could do so).
• Addressed an issue where some users reported experiencing Specialists being removed from Settlements when confirming the Legacy Cards from Age Transition.
• Addressed an issue that some users reported experiencing where the 300 Gold from discovering a Natural Wonder while playing as Isabella was not being granted.
• Addressed an issue that some users reported experiencing where the Factory was unavailable when a Distant Lands Settlement was connected to a Homelands Settlement in the Modern Age.
• Addressed an issue that some users reported experiencing where Sea Trade and Rail connections sometimes failed in Settlements where the City Center was not adjacent to the coast.

UI

• Continued to address alignment issues some users reported when playing in Simplified Chinese. We will continue to make improvements here in future patches.
• Improved Font Scaling in the Civilization and Tech Tree screens.
• Improved Image and Font alignment in the City details menu.
• Improved spacing and alignment on the War Declaration screen.
• Addressed an issue that some players reported experiencing with navigating the Civilopedia search results with a controller.
• Addressed an issue that some players reported experiencing where the Unique Quarter description appears cut off when viewing in Building Breakdown screen.
• Addressed an issue that some players reported experiencing where unlocalized text appears when viewing the "Nuclear Weapons Available" warning pop-up in Modern Age.
• Improvements to the Age Transition Spend Points screen.
• Added a notification for when an enemy attacks a player's Unit in single-player.
• Improved the performance of City Details screen when viewing a large City.
• Improved Progress Bar information consistency (HUD Progress wheels go the right way now).
• The Esc key can be used to back out of the Independent Power screen.
• Added Building icons to the plot tooltip with their status. Added Wonder icons to the plot tooltip with the gameplay effect. Made resource icons larger on improved tiles, and smaller on unimproved tiles. "Thank you for the inspiration Sukritact!"

Miscellaneous

• The correct citizen character set is now being displayed for Korean Independent Powers.

It all started just under two years ago when Ryan decided to post the first "drawing badly every day until Civ 7 is released". This cheerful little drawing depicted Ryan ready to play a peaceful game of Civ 6 before being interrupted by an unescorted AI settler.

A few commenters pointed out how big of a task this will likely end up being. "The Zelda one ran for over 900 days," one player said, while someone else just says: "Someday I'll be able to look back and say I was there 3,000 years ago…" But despite all the doubtful comments Ryan seemed certain that this was something that he had to do.

"Thought it could be a fun way to practice scribbling as I have no artistic talent whatsoever," Ursa Ryan says. "Plus if I don't do it how can we ever be sure Civ 7 will, in fact, be released?" Please don't make me do this for as long as theDuckPancake had to do with Breath of the Wild 2 (all credit to them for this amazing idea)."

After this first drawing Ryan stayed true to his word, posting a new piece every single day. There were meme templates, like Steam Vicky vs Empire Vicky on Day 72—Civ 6 commentary pieces like the penguin/human hybrids on Day 196—updates on just how long players were left waiting for anything to do with Civ 7, like Day 100 and 200—or some genuinely impressive artistic pieces like Day 300.

Day 250 of drawing badly every day until Civ 7 is released from r/civ

"People ask me all the time if my drawings have got better after 300 days of doing this," Ryan says under his Day 300 post. "The answer is clear. NO. Luckily for me, docksecky is an absolute talent, and kindly did this one for me. Thanks again, and sorry that this silly tradition of mine takes attention away from people like you with actual talent!"

Day 300's drawing may not be from Ursa Ryan, but I do think his drawings improved over the course of 638 days. I mean, just take a look at this drawing of Friedrich Baroque on Day 627. "It was inevitable skill has been developed and Ursa has evolved into a great artist," one player says.

But all good things must sadly come to an end, even when it hinges on Civ 7 getting released. The last day of drawing badly wasn't just a single picture, a meme, or some handy advice—instead, it detailed Ursa Ryan's story and how he got to this point.

It all started after Ryan left his first job and, despite feeling a little lost, decided to start a YouTube channel. Although he didn't have a desk or a PC, he was able to record Civ 6 videos on a laptop sat at the end of his bed on top of a set of drawers. "When Civ 6 launched, no one really watched my content, and that's fair it was really, really bad," Ursa Ryan says. "But that didn't matter. It was an escape, something that made the days go by." Back in October 2016 he had 42 subscribers, now he's got 72,000.

But during the Covid lockdowns, his videos started to gain traction and attract more viewers, at which point he started to draw more. This earned him even more popularity and saw him get invited to charity events, and even fly out to Baltimore to play Civ 7. "People argue all the time 'What is your favourite Civ game? 4? 5? Beyond Earth? Revolution? For me, it can only ever be Civ 6. Civ 6 was more than a game to me, it saved me and gave me so much, more than I can ever describe.

"To anyone thinking of doing this for Civ 8, be warned. This task is both more wonderful and dreadful than you could ever imagine. And Ursa, if you're reading this in a few years time, thinking of doing it again...DON'T."

This is the rare occasion where I'm not directing you to Nexus Mods: the early mods that have appeared for Civ 7 are over at the civfanatics.com forums. There aren't a ton of them yet, but there are definitely a few to point out.

Right out of the gate, there are a couple of mods that address one of the biggest complaints about Civ 7: the UI. Civ 7's interface is taking a serious pounding: I've seen Steam reviewers calling it "buggy," "inconsistent," "junk," "a total disaster," and most damningly, "somehow worse than Civ 6."

Firaxis has already issued a patch to address a few of the complaints about the UI and I suspect there will be more coming, but in the meantime you might check out Sukritact's Simple UI Adjustments. I haven't tried it myself yet, but it's got nothing but 5-star ratings in the forums. Here's a quick rundown on its features:

• Diplomacy with other Civs and IPs can now be initiated by clicking on the city banner (provided you have met them).
• Plot Yield icons are smaller on tiles that are not improved/worked
• Tooltips are enhanced.
  • The default improvement is now shown on unimproved tiles.
  • All Constructibles now display their icon.
  • Wonders receive a large fancy icon with description.
  • Buildings now note if they are damaged or in-progress or ageless.

Another mod is also focused on improving the UI: TCS Improved Plot Tooltop adds tons more info so it's easier to find what you need, including leader relationship status, settlement ownership, flags for obsolete or unique buildings, district types, and other useful tidbits you can spy at a glance.

If you're an eager beaver and are interested in instant gratification, check out the Civ 7 Unlock All Civs mod. With it, you no longer have to meet the requirements to access civilizations when you reach the Exploration and Modern Ages, they're all immediately available to you.

Work is already underway on bringing you bigger maps, with a beta of Larger Map, TSL, Continents++ available to download. It unlocks "large" and "huge" map sizes and adds a "massive" (128x80) map. The mod also lists experimental (not playable) "giant" maps (180x94) and "ludicrous" maps (230x116) to test out.

That's not bad for a game that only just came out, and you can find more mods at the Civ Fanatic forums. Make sure you carefully read the installation instructions on each mod's page before downloading.

Civilization 7 doesn't fully launch until February 11, but it's been available since February 6 for players who ponied up for the Founders Edition, and the reception has been a little rocky. It's climbed from a "mostly negative" initial user rating on Steam to "mixed," but it's still virtually a 50/50 mix of positive and negative reviews, driven largely by complaints about the game's UI.

Today's update fixes a number of interface-related problems, along with numerous bugs and gameplay issues. Notably, it also disables crossplay between PC and consoles for multiplayer, in order to "expedite updates to the PC." Developers can shove game updates for PC out the door as fast as they can make them, but on consoles they have to pass a certification process first, and that can slow things down. It's been an issue for games from Battlefield 3 to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and it leaves Firaxis with two choices: Hold the PC patches until the console updates get the green light, or hive them off until everything is properly smoothed out. Crossplay between Xbox and PlayStation consoles will continue to operate as normal.

The response to the patch seems generally positive so far: There are complaints about specific ongoing issues in the replies to the announcement on Steam, but there's also happiness that Firaxis seems to be on top of things. The studio said last week that it "will support Civilization 7 for years to come," which comes as no surprise given that Civ is one of Take-Two's biggest and most reliable game series, with an extremely long tail: Tens of thousands of people are currently playing prior games in the series, and even Civilization 3, the oldest Civ game on Steam, right now has a concurrent player count of nearly 2,000. There is precisely zero chance that Firaxis and 2K are going to wipe their hands and walk away anytime soon.

Still, the initial response to Civilization 7 is, if not alarming, at least a little unexpected, and it'll take some real work to address some of the more deeply-rooted complaints: Reworking an entire UI is a much bigger job than, say, tweaking individual leader stats here and there. (Unless you're trying to get Gandhi to stop glassing the planet, I suppose.)

The full Civilization 7 1.01 patch 2 notes are below.

Gameplay - Windows PC/Mac/Linux/Steam Deck

• Fixed an issue causing Ages in Epic and Marathon speed games to be shorter than intended.
  
• City States will now turn into Friendly Independent Powers on Age Transition instead of disappearing completely. They will also now start with more units in Exploration and Modern Ages.
  
• Fixed inconsistencies with Naval Combat.
  
• Naval Units will use the correct Combat Strength values when attacking another Naval Unit in all instances.
  
• Naval Units will properly take reciprocal damage after attacking another Naval Unit.
  
• Naval Units will more consistently move into the attacked tile after defeating another Naval Unit.
  
• Completing the final milestone of a Legacy Path no longer adds Age Progress in the Modern Age to ensure you have more time to complete a Victory.
  
• Towns will now switch their focus back to Growing town automatically if they are no longer eligible for their chosen Focus (for example, if their population decreases) until they are eligible again.
  
• Future Civic is now repeatable in all Ages. The cost of Future Tech and Future Civic will now increase more when repeated.
  
• Fixed an issue after too many bonuses to Growth where Food needed for the next growth event became negative.
  
• Improvements to Rail Networks aimed at increasing the reliability of Settlements connecting to the Rail Network over water by building Ports. This should apply as long as the Capital either has a Port or is connected by rail to a settlement with a Port.
  
• Made improvements to the Loyalty Crisis in the Antiquity Age, including giving the ability to purchase Villas in towns during this crisis, giving another way to manage the happiness of your settlements.
  
• A note about cross-play multiplayer: To expedite updates to the PC experience, we will sometimes deploy patches to PC at a different cadence than we do on consoles - including today's Patch 1.0.1. As a result, cross-play between PC players and console players is temporarily disabled. This will have no impact on console players attempting cross-platform play with other console players, nor on PC-to-PC multiplayer.

AI - Windows PC/Mac/Linux/Steam Deck

• AI will now offer high-value Cities less often during Peace Deals.
  
• In Modern, AI will now declare war less often at the start of the age.
  
• In Modern, AI will now consider Ideology more before Declaring War or offering Peace.
  
• Other Leaders now have a decreased desire for war if neither party has an Ideology.
  
• Other Leaders now have an increased desire for war with players of Opposing ideologies.
  
• Other Leaders now have a decreased desire for Peace with players of opposing Ideologies.

Camera - Windows PC/Mac/Linux/Steam Deck

• Fixed an issue on native-resolutions where the camera would focus on the lower end of the map when clicking on the minimap.

UI - Windows PC/Mac/Linux/Steam Deck

• Replaced the Simplified Chinese font with the font used in Civilization VI while we work on additional improvements for future patches.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Settlement menu fails to open when clicking on a non-player's Settlement Banner in gameplay.
  
• Fixed an issue where yield icons fail to populate on the now available buildings when converting a town to city.
  
• Fixed an issue where some text was cut off on the Global Yields Breakdown screen.
  
• Added a notification for completed Espionage actions, so that you can more easily check the results of their Espionage actions.
  
• City projects no longer appear to be purchasable.
  
• Your current religion is now displayed first in the belief picker tabs.
  
• Fixed an issue where a District’s health bar would remain on-screen after being fully healed.
  
• Fixed an issue where Leaders fail to have a portrait when the relationship has changed during gameplay.
  
• Improved the alignment of leader names and portraits on the Age Summary, when viewing the Overview screen of the Victories Rankings.
  
• Fixed an issue where the background color remains the default color when the user changes it in the Player Customize tab.
  
• Improved the spacing between Civ descriptions, unique units and building icons on loading screen.

If history teaches us one thing, it's this: it's always a great idea to invade Central Asia. It just can't go wrong. Honestly, if this games journalism thing doesn't work out, I'm thinking I might head over there with the lads and establish some kind of thousand-year imperium. That or back to SEO writing.

Ah, wait, I'm learning from the title of Paradox's upcoming DLC for Hearts of Iron 4 that I'm mistaken. Graveyard of Empires is the next country pack for the studio's WW2 sim, announced last year, and offering all-new ways for your imperial ambitions to crash into the rocks of a region that's got a habit of putting paid to that sort of thing. It's now got a release date: it's arriving March 4, for $15 (£12.79).

The DLC brings new content for Iran, India, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with stuff to make each of them feel a bit more unique in the course of play. Iran sounds like it'll be mostly torn between fending off the Soviet Union on one side and Britain on the other, with "a significant new focus tree" that will give you a chance to "resist the imperial incursions that have historically weakened" the country. You can also revive the Achaemenid Empire, if you reckon that what WW2 was really missing was even more seismic political upheaval.

India, meanwhile, isn't yet free of the British yoke during HOI4's timespan. The subcontinent's new focus tree will revolve around the Indian independence movement, offering all sorts of alternate histories for you to pursue as you liberate the country. That includes reviving the East India Company, which seems a bit of a sidegrade to me.

Iraq is also tethered to Britain as a client state, which means its part of the DLC also sounds like it revolves around, well, trying to get rid of the British (sorry everyone). "Try to chart your own path," reads the blurb, "embracing the calls for pan-Arab nationalism and siding with the axis against the allies." You'll also have to navigate the various ethnic and religious tensions that make Iraqi society so brittle and, hey, maybe do something with those oil fields, huh?

Finally, there's Afghanistan, which is actually the place people call the graveyard of empires. Funnily enough, it kind of sounds like Afghanistan is having a relatively gentle go of WW2 in HOI4: "Isolated from the wider war, [it] offers many alternate paths." That means you can either "continue the historical path of neutrality and isolation" (so, you know, just kind of hang out for 20ish years, I guess) or try to build a new industrial superpower in the foothills. I'd go for that one, personally, in this war game.

Commandos: Origins is being developed by Claymore Game Studios and published by Kalypso. It'll tell the story of how the dirty half-dozen—the green beret, the sapper, the sniper, the driver, the marine, and the spy—came together in the early days of World War II, over the course of more than 10 missions.

Claymore's studio director, Jürgen Reusswig, said that, "After more than four years of setting up a new studio, design and development and the invaluable community feedback from various playtests, operation 'Release' is a go for Commandos: Origins. We are proud and excited that players will now be able to experience the origins story of the elite unit which started this legendary franchise."

As well as singleplayer it'll have two-player co-op, which can be played either splitscreen local or online. Commandos: Origins is scheduled for release on April 9 via Steam, where you can currently download a demo.

It's not quite out on PCs yet—unless you paid to play early—but it looks like a VR edition of Sid Meier's Civilization 7 will be coming to Meta Quest with its own unique features later this Spring.

Civilization 7 VR will set you around a command table with the leaders of the other civilizations you're playing against—that's right, you'll get life-size lectures from Ben Franklin about your diplomacy and have Cleopatra tell you off in Egyptian straight to your face. The table seems like a neat way to do mixed-reality Civilization, which was always more board game than simulation. It all looks and sounds a bit absurd but also the sheer novelty of it is probably thrilling.

"Enjoy Civilization from a unique perspective, whether you're peering down from high above the map or leaning all the way in to appreciate the finer details of every building and unit," says the store page. I think they're probably right, as Civilization 7's little models are indeed intricately detailed and the VR edition might just be the only way to see them at novel angles.

PC Gamer gave Civilization 7 a 76% in our review, the lowest score we've ever given to a game in the series. Contributor Robert Zak cited issues with the user interface and how thin the new game mechanics felt, saying it "feels more like a series offshoot than a Civilization 6 sequel."

"It's as if Civ's gone through its own age transition—a few steps forward, a few steps back," Rob wrote. "While it's addressed some longstanding issues, there's a little too much that's been stripped away for veterans like myself to call this meaningful progress on the legendary series' Legacy Path."

Players are just as divided on the new iteration as critics, with those who paid to play early pushing Civilization 7 all the way down to a Mixed review score on Steam.

You can find Sid Meier's Civilization 7 VR on Meta's website, where it will release in "Spring 2025."

Looking at the options I was presented with, this is just one of many ways to navigate my first foray into Heart of the Machine, a wildly ambitious sci-fi strategy roleplaying sandbox from Arcen Games, best known for the AI War series and also being primarily solo developer Chris Park, give or take a few contractors. While Heart of the Machine bills itself as a turn-based 4X game (and it does have a lot of building, resource management and expansion, plus some unusual tactical combat), the touchstone I keep coming back to is historical sandbox Crusader Kings.

That is, this is a game about expressive storytelling through a mixture of complex stat-based simulation and multiple-choice vignettes tied to character stats. And instead of asking you what you’d have done differently as King Henry VIII, it puts you in the role of a newly-emerged machine mind in a dystopian mega-city and lets you do almost anything with that power. You could immediately plot to exterminate humanity, become their benevolent ruler (possibly even worshipped as a god), or secretly take over the economy through fake identities and shell companies; Nobody will ever suspect Hugh Mann, CEO.

Information warfare

As you'd expect from a game that lets you tackle everything from individual disguised infiltration to city-scale industry, there's a lot of UI to wrestle with. The city can be viewed up-close (ideal for tactical placement of units) or from a more abstract grid-style view, but your main points of interaction—an ever-shifting assortment of events and hotspots—need to be sifted through a wheel of display modes, some of which have their own drop-downs and filters. There's always far more going on in a turn than you can hope to interact with, but after a while I realised that's the point. Choices really do matter here, and the writing (often framed as your AI's internal monologue) really encourages you to roleplay it your own way.

Much like Crusader Kings and its fluid, ever-shifting histories, the emphasis here is that there are no 'wrong' choices. While there is a soft deadline (approximately 1000 turns) until some kind of apocalypse rolls through the city, the game takes time to explain that you really shouldn't feel rushed, and the end of the world doesn't necessarily mean the end of you. Plus, if you become an advanced enough super-intelligence, then time travel makes the whole deadline thing moot. This is arguably a Skynet simulator after all—what's the point of having infinite intelligence if you can't kick causality's ass with it too?

It's the miniature story-arcs that the game tells through a mixture of multi-choice dialogues and systemic encounters that have me really sold on Heart of the Machine. Early on I needed to collect weapons to enable raids on facilities around the city. I tried stealing from local gangs, but the reprisal attacks cost me a bunch of my android bodies (fortunately expendable and easily replaced), so instead I had a bot scan a fully-armored trooper at a local PMC base. This unlocked the ability to spawn a robot that looked just like an armored squaddie, which I quickly assembled.

My freshly-minted fake soldier infiltrated a base and managed to steal an officer's credentials. This in turn allowed me to visit a local black market dealer and just buy an assortment of military spec gear, which I could afford because I had the foresight to send another body off to spend a day skimming off the bank accounts of the middle class, giving me a modest infusion of human money, one of many resources and currencies that you may or may not engage with at all in your playthrough.

Fake plastic trees

This being an Arcen game (and thus primarily the work of just one man), there's a few weaker areas to Heart of the Machine's presentation. While the procedurally generated cyber-city is bustling with land and air traffic, there's very little 2D art and characters are represented as little more than humanoid silhouettes. Nothing beyond traffic is animated and the world-state snaps abruptly when you conclude one turn and move to the next. Understandable when it's little abstract person-counters moving around the board, but a bit jarring when it's huge mechs and airships snapping from point to point. Every action on the enemy side plays out seemingly simultaneously in an explosive swarm of particle effects, noise and floating damage numbers, giving you a combat log to read over instead of a chain of comprehensible events.

It's a lot to process, but that's what I've come to expect from Arcen's games. The mega-scale battles of AI War were almost all won on a strategic level, rather than tactical, but the early game in Heart of the Machine's smaller scale leads to some surprisingly gritty combat. While later you'll have 'bulk' units that work semi-autonomously, early on you're directly controlling small squads of robot bodies, splitting your mental energy each turn between them, and (much like Ultron) casually spawning in new shells as each one falls. After all, they're all me, and they're so very many of me.

These close-combat encounters heavily encouraged me to place bots across multiple rooftops to gain height and flanking bonuses against enemies, while deploying consumable resources like defensive nano-clouds to protect my most targeted units. It's surprisingly in-depth, as with almost everything else in the game, and again, just the tip of the iceberg. There are also options to non-lethally subdue humans, demoralise them until they retreat or just plain terrify them with liquid-metal monstrosities. Or, in some cases, just talk to them. I've yet to wrap my head around the game's intensely detailed diplomacy minigame, and I hear loud static when I even try to think about the hacking system. I feel like it's going to take me dozens of hours more just to comprehend the bounds of this game, and that's very, very exciting.

Even with it being brand new in early access, this feels like Arcen's most coherent, complete game yet. There are many possible endings (good or bad) I could be working towards, and even more that require temporal shenanigans or literally building the Torment Nexus. The UI is a bit of a bear and sometimes progressing tutorial plot-lines requires very specific events and actions, but if this is just the beginning for Heart of the Machine, I cannot wait to see what it grows into after the planned year (at least) of early access lets it warp and mold itself around player feedback—especially considering how many expansions and updates both AI War games have seen. Heart of the Machine is out now on Epic, Steam and GOG for £19.99/$23.99.

As we noted earlier today, Civ 7 is off to a rocky start, with a "mixed" rating on Steam: Currently, only 44% of the game's user reviews are positive, a far cry from what you'd expect from one of the most storied and reliable series in videogame history. PC Gamer's Tyler Wilde warned last week that the game would likely be "contentious" among critics and fans, mainly because of significant changes made to the game's ages system, which is now essentially a series of "soft resets" between the Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern ages that requires players to choose a new civilization for each new age, and the streamlining of some game systems.

But it's the interface that seems to be the big sticking point, at least at this early stage of things. There are plenty of complaints in the Steam user reviews but the UI is the most common thread, and even some positive reviews cite the interface as an issue: One positive review calls Civilization 7 "an amazing game," but warns that the "UI is so bad I can't sleep anymore." Another, also positive, describes the UI as "abysmal," and a third—still a positive verdict overall, remember—calls it "absolute trash."

It's not often that you see both positive and negative reviews complaining about the same thing, and it's reached the point where Firaxis has taken notice. "We are aware of and looking into feedback on the game's UI," the studio said in a developer response to at least three Steam user reviews. "We're continuing to make improvements to Civilization 7, and appreciate you taking the time to drop your feedback."

It's a stock response, yes, but at least it's an acknowledgement that things aren't right, and some adjustments to the UI have already been made, as part of the 1.01 patch that went live yesterday:

• Updated minimap to show tile ownership by player
• Added new information to the City Details screen that shows where a Town is sending its food and what Town a City is receiving food from
• Added Auto Unit Cycle option to toggle on/off when a Unit has remaining movement
• Added custom Religion naming
• Policy screen now shows how many free slots are available

Firaxis provided more in-depth commentary on its long-term plans in a statement released today.

"Over the last few days, the team has been poring over your feedback, including our most recent Steam Reviews during the Early Access period," the studio wrote. "As stewards of the Civilization franchise, we hold ourselves to a high standard and always strive to create the best game possible. Civ would not have come this far without you, and your opinions matter greatly to us."

Firaxis said it's identified "three key areas" to focus on, based on early feedback, and yes, the UI is top of the list:

• Prioritizing UI Improvements: Our top priority is improving the UI. We need some time to digest all of your feedback, but some areas that we're already looking into include making UI interactions more intuitive, improving map readability, fixing areas of polish like formatting, and more. We're committed to getting this right, and will share more details as soon as we can.
• Implementing Community-Requested Features: Several key features that we've seen you ask for will be included in upcoming patches as free updates, and we'll continue to work with the community to improve and add to the game. We're still working on exact timing, but can share the following items are being prioritized: 
  • Adding Teams to multiplayer games so you can play cooperatively
  • Allowing full player counts in multiplayer in all three Ages through refinements to our Distant Lands system.
  • Allowing you to pick your starting and ending Age to allow for single or double Age games
  • Providing a wider variety of map types
  • Enabling city and religion names to be customized
  • Adding in hotseat multiplayer
• Rolling Out Quality-of-Life Updates in Patch 1.1.0 (Deploying in March): Work is already well underway on Patch 1.1.0, which includes fixes and adjustments that were already on our radar. This list includes quality-of-life UI adjustments, ongoing AI balance and improvement, adjustments to diplomacy and crises, plus additional bug fixes.

There's no time frame for any of this, but I don't imagine we'll see wholesale changes anytime soon—updating the UI alone is a much bigger job than, say, tweaking some stats here and there. Firaxis said a development roadmap will be shared as soon as possible.

"We will support Civilization 7 for years to come, and your feedback remains critical in helping us grow and build the future of Civ," Firaxis wrote in today's update. "If you have feedback you’d like to share, please do so in the Steam Discussion forums or drop a thread in our official Civilization Discord Server. Thank you for being the best fans in the world. We're excited to be on this journey with you—see you in the game!"

Here's how to generate influence in Civ 7, and—more importantly—how to put it to good use:

How do I get influence in Civilization 7?

The primary way of getting influence is through Urban buildings like the Altar, but it can also come from certain Wonders, Policies, Diplomatic Pacts, and leader or civ abilities. Civ 7 will repeatedly warn you that there is a cap on how much Influence you can have stored, so you should spend it as you get it. But this cap isn't displayed anywhere in the UI or mentioned in the Civilopedia, and I have never personally been able to hit any kind of cap even when I was trying to. My honest suspicion is that this cap doesn't actually exist, but some references to it remain from an earlier build when it might have. If you know anything more about the Influence cap, let us know in the comments.

Spending influence on City-States

One of the best ways to spend Influence, especially if you're playing as a leader like Tecumseh, is befriending City-States. For a one-time investment, you will start ticking up toward befriending them. Some City-States will start out as hostile, meaning this process will take longer. But once you hit the first milestone, their military units will stop being hostile to you. At the next milestone, you will become their suzerain, and get to pick a suzerain bonus like a unique tile improvement or a free technology. Finally, at the highest level, you can spend another large chunk of Influence to integrate them and make their capital into a town under your control.

If another leader is trying to befriend the same City-State at the same time, you can spend more influence to speed up the process and beat them to the punch. It's also possible to spend Influence on a City-State you are already suzerain of to promote their growth, bolster their military, or levy some of their military units, which gives you permanent control of them.

Spending influence on Diplomatic Pacts

One of the other main ways to use Influence is on Diplomatic Pacts, which have a one-time cost and can be responded to in multiple ways:

• The other leader can Accept your proposal, which costs them no Influence, which typically gives you as the sender a medium-sized bonus and they either get a small bonus or no bonus.
• The other leader can Support your proposal, which costs them Influence, and gives both of you a larger bonus.
• The other leader can Reject your proposal, which costs them Influence, refunds you your Influence, and cancels the whole agreement.

This also works the same in reverse for you, when you receive a Diplomatic Proposal from another leader.

Typically you can only have one of each type of Diplomatic Proposal going at once, though certain abilities increase this limit. You should almost always have the main type of Diplomatic Proposal relevant to the Legacy Path you're pursuing active, such as a Research Agreement if you want to win a Science victory.

An important pact for military leaders is Denounce, which will lower your opinion with another leader. It can also be used against you, so you might want to keep some influence saved to counter it. The reason it's so significant is that declaring war on someone you have good relations with is considered a Surprise War, which penalizes your starting War Support.

War Support

In Civ 7, War Support is a tug-of-war mechanic representing who is seen as being more "in the right" in a given war. Declaring a Surprise War, for instance, will usually start you on the back foot in terms of War Support. Both combatants can spend Influence to swing War Support to their side, but it gets more expensive every time. There are also some Wonders and Policies that grant more War Support.

For every point you're behind in War Support, your units will incur a stacking combat penalty against the opposing leader's units, and it will penalize your overall Happiness in every settlement. So it's really not a good idea to start a war where you're not going to be able to stay ahead in War Support, and you can very reliably end one even when you're outgunned by driving your side's War Support up.

Espionage

Eventually, you will gain the ability to spend Influence on Espionage actions, such as stealing technologies from another leader. They typically have a 100% chance to succeed, but may have a high chance of being discovered if you're not focusing on espionage. Being discovered will give you a large negative opinion modifier with the other leader. You can defend against Espionage actions with the Counterespionage action, which makes Espionage actions against you from that leader take longer and have a higher chance of being discovered.

Almost every Legacy Path will require some understanding of Influence if you really want to make the most of your capabilities, and it's especially important for Military victories. For more specific tips on each legacy path, check out our Victory Conditions guide.

Announced today, Paradox has acquired all shares in Haemimont Games and now wholly owns it. In a press release, the publisher called the acquisition "a further step in Paradox's strategic focus on growing in the management games genre, by building a strong internal capability that complements the Group's current studio organization".

This lines up with Paradox's renewed focus on its core genres. Last year, I dug into the past, present and future of the Swedish publisher, and spoke with Deputy CEO Mattias Lilja and CCO Henrik Fåhraeus about what's been a rough couple of years. There's been the tumultuous development of Bloodlines 2, the troubled launch of Cities: Skylines 2 and the cancellation of Life By You.

"We have solved this problem before," said Lilja, "and then we sort of forgot. But I think essentially the solution is what we did back then. We refocused on the core." He also admitted that Paradox had a habit of releasing games too early and dealing with technical issues after launch. Meanwhile, the success of games like Crusader Kings, Stellaris and Cities: Skylines made it too "overconfident", resulting in risky investments and taking on the types of games it didn't have any experience with.

For Paradox, Haemimont feels like the opposite of a risky investment. Indeed, the studio was responsible for one of Paradox's big wins: Surviving Mars. It strikes me as a good fit, then, and the only thing that's surprising about it is the fact that Paradox used Surviving Mars as a jumping off point for a whole series of (less successful) Surviving games, but didn't get Haemimont to develop them.

I'm interested in seeing what Haemimont does next, then, and if it ends up returning to the series. Though after its impressive handling of Jagged Alliance 3—the first good Jagged Alliance in a long, long time—I'd be just as keen to see it tackle another tactics game. Especially now that Paradox and Harebrained Schemes are no longer together. We'll have to wait and see, since it's yet to announce its first project as a Paradox studio.

"We're delighted to become a part of the Paradox family!" said Gabriel Dobrev, Founder of Haemimont Games. "The cultural fit between our companies is remarkable, and we already feel at home. This partnership empowers us to push the boundaries of our games, delivering deeper and more intense experiences to our players. It also opens new horizons for our team, technology, and creative processes, which we're eager to explore. Expect amazing new games from us!"

The game currently sits at a 'Mixed' rating on Steam, with just 40% of around 1,700 reviews giving it a thumbs up. This is at least an improvement over the earliest user reviews, which branded it as 'Mostly Negative'. We anticipated Civ 7 might have its detractors due to its new Age transitions, where players are forced to change their Civilization in each of a game's three acts. But the reviews generally seem very happy with these changes, even the negative ones. "The game's new mechanics are pretty interesting", writes Steam user WillNever, who gives the game a thumbs down, while similarly negative reviewer Con states that "Mechanics are fine and change is necessary and will always divide the community at the start."

Instead, the community's main gripe with Civ 7 appears to be the UI. WillNever writes that "The UI looks and feels like it was created in the alpha stages of development and was never refined". While user Lathium states the interface is "unfortunately very poor here and feels ported over from console in the worst way possible." Other problems the community point to include a limited map selection, the maximum map size being 'Standard', and the lack of quick move and quick combat functionality.

There are a couple of caveats worth mentioning here. These reviews are all from a specific pool of players who paid £120/$130 to play the game, and so their standards are likely to be higher than those who buy the standard edition (though at £60/$70, this still isn't exactly cheap.) We'll have to wait for the game to unlock fully for the full range of opinions to flood in.

That said, this isn't the reception Firaxis would want from its most dedicated fans. Moreover, the negative reviews seem reasonable and clear-eyed compared to how Steam reviews can sometimes be. There are some stronger opinions, such as user Cool CGI Dog's assertion that ''Comparing this unfinished mess to the Civ 6 release is night and day." But broadly, this isn't a bunch of people moaning that Civilization 7 isn't the game they know and love, or overreacting to some hyper-specific feature they don't like. If anything, its bolder swings are what they like about it the most.

We'll have a better sense of how the community feels about Civilization 7 when the game launches properly on February 11. Our own reviewer Robert Zak found it to be a mostly successful evolution of the series, praising its Age transitions and Firaxis' broader attempts to improve the game's pacing, though he noted that "there's a little too much that's been stripped away for veterans like myself to call this meaningful progress".

1. You pick a new civilization

Your leader and their bonuses will stick with you through the entire game, but you pick a new civ with their own ability, units, and buildings for every age. Some are unlocked by the leader you're playing—Ben Franklin can always pick America in the Modern Age. Some are unlocked by the civ you picked previously—the Han can always become Ming. And some are unlocked by your accomplishments—having a certain number of improved Horse tiles in your empire lets you become the Mongols.

Unique Quarters and tile improvements will stick around and retain their bonuses forever. But unique units will downgrade into the generic version of the same unit type for the next age, unless you picked a new civ that also has a unique unit in that same unit category. And any other unique stuff like Great People will disappear, so use them before the age ends!

2. Military consolidation

At the age transition, your military will get reshuffled in the following order:

• Up to six units (typically melee infantry) will be yoinked away from wherever they happened to be standing and placed on your active Settlements to defend them.
• Any remaining units will be placed in the custody of any active army or navy Commanders you have. This, somewhat annoyingly, does not mean that units already assigned to a Commander won't be messed with. So you may end up in the next age with Commanders who are suddenly leading an army of all artillery or something.
• Everyone else gets deleted, including Scouts, so make sure you have enough Commanders!

As a small consolation, at the beginning of the Exploration Age, everyone gets a free Cog to begin exploring the seas. Also, all of your surviving units will be upgraded to the lowest-tech unit available in the new age automatically.

3. All of your cities downgrade to towns except for the capital

There is an exception to this if you unlock the Economic Golden Age for the previous age. There is also an option each age to change the capital to a new location, which will still leave your old capital as a city. So this is a bit of a trade-off, but it means you'll begin the age with two cities instead of one.

4. Buildings from the previous age have their adjacency bonuses removed

This means they will no longer benefit from, nor grant adjacency to, any other buildings. The main exception to this are buildings that have been designated 'Ageless,' like Warehouses, and any civ unique tile improvements.

This is why overbuilding becomes so important—it's almost always better to build over a previous age building that is no longer getting or granting adjacency bonuses with one from the current age, which will restore those bonuses.

There are a few other exceptions to this. The Wonders of the Ancient World Golden Age from the Culture Legacy Path will allow Amphitheaters to keep their adjacency bonuses in the Exploration Age. The Great Library Golden Age from the Science Legacy Path will allow Academies to keep their adjacency bonuses in the Exploration Age. And the Enlightenment Golden Age, also from the Science Legacy Path, will allow Universities to keep their adjacency bonuses in the Modern Age.

5. Resources around the map are reshuffled

Some resources from the previous age will become new ones, and some new ones will appear where none were before. Unlike Civ 6, your existing improvements will stay where they are and may just change what resource they provide at the transition—including changing type, which can affect your Warehouse buildings. For example, Iron becomes irrelevant in the Modern Age, so those deposits might turn into a new, Modern Age resource like Coal. But I've even seen weirder ones like Camels becoming Oil (which I guess makes sense on a long enough timeline), and my Camp on that tile automatically became an Oil Rig.

To sum it up, a place that already has a resource deposit will never lose that deposit. The type of deposit might change. But deposit locations can only ever be added, not removed.

Other age transition effects

• Any City-States or other independents are removed. This includes the ones you were suzerain of. If you want to keep those cities, you'll need to pay the Influence to integrate them into your empire before the age ends. New ones will start to spawn in unsettled areas after a turn or two in the current age.
• Alliances and diplomatic pacts are reset. You will get an opinion bonus or malus based on your relations with each leader in the previous age.
• You get totally new Tech and Civics trees. They're both per age now, so you can only ever fall so behind. Getting ahead isn't a matter of racing down the tree, but of reaching "Future Tech" and "Future Civics" in the previous age, which will give you bonuses to Science and Culture in the next Age once researched.
• Spend Legacy points. Depending on how many Legacy Points you earned in the previous age, you can buy Legacies for the next age. If you completed no objectives in a certain category, you can also choose to take a Dark Age for that Legacy Path instead, which tends to give some powerful bonuses but also a powerful drawback. For example, the Military Dark Age in the Exploration Age destroys all of your Settlements except your capital, but gives you three full cavalry armies for free. Excellent for some Mongol roleplay.
• Unlock new Legacy Paths. Every age has its own set of Legacy Path objectives for Culture, Science, Military, and Economics. Check out our Civ 7 Victory Guide to learn more about them.

It can be a little bit disorienting to ride out this transition the first few times, especially given the changes that you aren't warned about. But once you know what to expect, you can plan for each new age almost like you're starting a fresh campaign. Though if Isabella thinks I'm going to forget what she did, she's in for a rude awakening.

If you're keen to do some early brushing up on your empire-building, we've got plenty of resources for the would-be world leader. Our Civ 7 victory guide can help you chart your path to primacy in every age, while our handbook for Civ 7 towns and cities work will give you some tips for managing your municipalities. You can't just slap a wonder down anywhere, after all.

Civilization 7 early access unlock time

To play Civ 7 five days earlier than its full launch date, you'll need to have preordered either its Deluxe Edition or its Founders Edition. Civ 7 early access will unlock at 12 am EST on February 6, meaning everywhere west of the US east coast will technically have early access on February 5. Here's when Civ 7 early access unlocks in time zones around the world:

Civilization 7 early access launch times

• 9 pm, February 5 (PST)
• 12 am, February 6 (EST)
• 5 am, February 6 (GMT)
• 4 pm, February 6 (AEDT)
• 6 pm, February 6 (NZDT)

Civilization 7 full launch release date

For those of us willing to wait to leave our mark, however ignominious, on the long arc of virtual history, we've got five more days before we're menaced by the forces of hostile city-states. Similar to early access, Civ 7's full launch will be at 12 am EST on February 11, giving it a February 10 launch for everywhere further west.

Here's the full launch times for Civ 7 around the globe:

Civilization 7 full launch times

• 9 pm, February 10 (PST)
• 12 am, February 11 (EST)
• 5 am, February 11 (GMT)
• 4 pm, February 11 (AEDT)
• 6 pm, February 11 (NZDT)

Will Civilization 7 have preloading?

Nope.

While console players get to enjoy a nice, easy preload, Civilization 7 won't be available for preload on PC. We'll have to start our downloads at unlock time, however urgent our needs to start researching Animal Husbandry might be.

The new game in Sid Meier's distinguished grand strategy series is a major departure from Civ 6, restructuring our progression through history and tweaking many of the systems we've grown used to, including city planning, warfare, and diplomacy. I love Civ 7's new environment art, and the three-age structure strikes me as a smart experiment, introducing soft resets on the way from antiquity to modernity that inject some of the early game fun into the midgame. But there's a lot for Civ 5 and 6 fans to pine for, too—I expect this to be a controversial game among Civ lifers, and sure enough it's started life with "Mixed" user reviews on Steam.

We'll be covering the response to Civilization 7 and all the other launch news here with regular updates. Scroll down for info on our review, launch times, and more.

Our Civilization 7 review: 76%

Reviewer Robert Zak had plenty of criticism in our Civilization 7 review, but ultimately enjoyed Firaxis' latest 4X game, noting that its flaws exist in comparison to Civ 5 and Civ 6—two exceptionally good strategy games that have both had years of post-launch updates. In his conclusion, he wrote:

Civilization 7 feels like a reaction to the maximalism of its predecessor: sleeker and speedier, colder and less complex. Being the first game in the series to come out on consoles at the same time as PC, I can't help but feel that some of the complexity cutbacks are made with gamepad players in mind. Some of these cuts are positive, and they help the game flow better (especially, I imagine, in multiplayer), but the simplification of systems like religion, diplomacy, city-states, and espionage means that the journey through history doesn't feel quite as rich or rewarding.

It's as if Civ's gone through its own age transition—a few steps forward, a few steps back. While it's addressed some longstanding issues, there's a little too much that's been stripped away for veterans like myself to call this meaningful progress on the legendary series' Legacy Path.

Civilization 7 review round-up

Civ 7 reviews dropped on Monday, and so far there's a mix of high praise and cooler-but-still-optimistic takes (like you'll find in our review), as well as a handful of mostly negative assessments.

I think the conversation's going to get more heated once Civ 7 is available to the public and new and old fans start playing, but for now, here's a sampling of what critics are saying:

• The Guardian — 100
• Windows Central — 4.5/5
• Destructoid — 9/10
• GamesRadar — 4/5
• TechRadar — 4/5
• GameSpot — 8
• PC Gamer — 76%
• IGN — 7
• Eurogamer — 2/5

Civilization 7 launch times

Civilization 7 is launching in two phases:

• Early Access: February 5 at 9 pm Pacific (must pre-purchase Deluxe or Founders Edition)
• Full release: February 10 at 9 pm Pacific

Firaxis put together the graphic below with launch times across the globe:

Learn the Civ 7 basics while you wait for it to unlock

Civilization 7 simplifies things in some ways, but I definitely wouldn't say it's simple, and if you've been playing Civ 5 and 6 for a long time, some of the changes might throw you at first. We've got more guides coming, but for starters, here are some introductions to Civ 7's systems:

• Civilization 7 victory guide: Civ 7's win conditions are similar to those of previous games, but the new ages and Legacy Paths add some wrinkles.
• Civilization 7 age transition guide: Not everything that happens in one of the new age transitions is explained in the game. This guide will help prepare you for your first historical long jump.
• Civilization 7 settlements guide: Along with cities, you can now control towns. The way you grow and build up these settlements has also changed (RIP Workers).

Our Civilization 7 performance testing

Our Civilization 7 performance analysis was done before the launch patch, and if things improve a ton in the retail version we'll reassess it, but our initial verdict is that the frame rates aren't as steady as we'd like. As is often the case with strategy games, expect things to slow down in the late game, especially if you have an older CPU—those AI turns can still make 'em chug.

Civ 7 will run on a variety of systems, though, and is Steam Deck Verified. Careful, though: The ability to take the 'one more turn' experience to bed with you sounds dangerous.

The graph below shows our AI benchmarking—see the full performance guide for more.

Civilization 7 early access launches, first user reviews in

The Civ 7 early access period—the annoying FOMO-upselling-tactic kind, not a beta—has begun for those who pre-purchased the $100 Deluxe Edition or $130 Founders Edition.

That means that the first Steam user reviews are popping up. I don't think we can draw too many conclusions about what the overall reception will look like from these hip-fired early impressions, but, as predicted, it's contentious—the first 400 or so user reviews have averaged out to Steam's "Mostly Negative" rating.

Civilization 7 earns an early 'Mixed' review rating on Steam

After 11 hours, Civ 7's Steam user review average is sitting at "Mixed," with just 41% of nearly 2,600 reviews coming in as positive. The main complaints so far are related to the new entry's UI, with critical reviewers describing the interface as feeling unfinished and frustratingly unintuitive. That said, despite our prerelease predictions that Civ 7's changes to age progression would prove decisive, even negative reviews are praising the new mechanics as interesting updates to the Civ formula.

This is still the early access period, so only those who've paid $100 or more for one of the special editions has access, and is able to leave a review. We'll see what happens when February 11 comes around and the gates open fully.

Firaxis is "aware of and looking into feedback" about Civ 7 UI woes

As early Civ 7 reviews continue to be defined by interface frustrations, with some players declaring the "UI is so bad I can't sleep anymore," Firaxis has already acknowledged the UI criticisms from its earliest player cohort.

"We are aware of and looking into feedback on the game's UI," Firaxis said in replies to at least three Steam user reviews. "We're continuing to make improvements to Civilization 7, and appreciate you taking the time to drop your feedback."

Stock replies are only so reassuring, but it's nice to see Firaxis getting out ahead of the issue early. The studio's already pushing out updates—a patch hit yesterday with minimap and City Detail screen adjustments, for example—so it's possible some of those interface frustrations will be alleviated before long.

How do you feel about Civ 7's "readable realism" artwork?

I didn't care much for Civ 6's bright colors and smooth-looking surfaces, and when I pointed out that common criticism to Civ 7 senior art director Jason Johnson during an interview for a magazine feature last year, he informed me that he had also been Civ 6's lead environment artist, and that he still loves Civ 6's art. If I grinned stupidly in that moment, it was only partly due to embarrassment for not having looked up his previous credits—I actually really enjoyed the reminder that we really do contain multitudes. Multitudes of ways to make fun little guys and trains and things, at least. I really like Civ 7's unit and environment art.

They're calling the style "readable realism" at Firaxis, and it takes miniatures and dioramas as primary inspirations. That's not exactly a big leap for what's essentially a boardgame on the computer, but it does go beyond that obvious connection for Johnson, who told me he's "obsessed" with miniatures.

"I'm an only child," the senior art director said, "so I would spend all this time in museums looking at dioramas and just staring at them and telling a story: What was going on in this non-animated scene?"

Civ 7 players are already meme-ing their favorite leader/civilization combos

god emperor benjamin franklin of the mongols from r/civ

Civilization 7 breaks from series tradition by breaking apart leaders and their respective civs. Because the new age structure has you pick a new civilization during the transition into each era, you might have a game where Machiavelli is the pharaoh of Egypt, then the Abbasid caliph, and finally the king of Buganda.

Unsurprisingly, early access players are finding a lot of joy in the unexpected pairings, like in this fanart from redditor feralsilverine depicting God Emperor Benjamin Franklin of the Mongols.

Civilization 7 is rolling out across the globe now...

Civilization 7 has been available since last week for those who preordered the pricey Deluxe or Founders Editions, while the full launch for the regular $70 version is Tuesday, February 11 (also pricey by the old standards, but that's the baseline these days).

If you're on the US west coast, Civilization 7 releases at 9 pm Pacific tonight, February 10. Elsewhere, it's out at midnight in the local time zone—that means the launch has already happened in Japan, Australia, and China, although it's the middle of the night, so presumably only Sid Meier's biggest fans have fired it up so far.

New patch fixes some UI problems, tweaks AI

Firaxis has put out a quick patch that aims to address some of the complaints in the currently "Mixed" Civilization 7 Steam reviews, where early access players have especially taken issue with the interface. Patch 2 fixes a number of bugs related to the UI, and also makes some gameplay and AI tweaks—you can see the full patch notes on Steam.

The update is just for the Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of Civilization 7—patching console versions tends to take longer—which means that the PC and console versions have now diverged and PC/console crossplay has been temporarily turned off as a result. It'll come back once there's version parity between platforms, and in the meantime PC/PC and console/console multiplayer should work fine.

Firaxis says to expect "larger, more substantive updates" in the future.

Civilization 7 global launch completed

Civ 7 should be available around the world now, and is rising up Steam's top concurrent players chart. If you're downloading it now, you could pass the time with our intro guides, which explain some of the big changes:

• Civilization 7 victory guide: Civ 7's win conditions are similar to those of previous games, but the new ages and Legacy Paths add some wrinkles.
• Civilization 7 age transition guide: Not everything that happens in one of the new age transitions is explained in the game. This guide will help prepare you for your first historical long jump.
• Civilization 7 settlements guide: Along with cities, you can now control towns. The way you grow and build up these settlements has also changed (RIP Workers).
• Civilization 7 influence guide: How the new Influence currency works.

Civ 7 scouts have really good eyesight

You can see distant land civs in the antiquity age, but can't meet them despite how much waving and shouting you do! lol from r/civ

One of the consequences of Civilization 7's new ages system is that voyages to "distant lands"—other continents, more or less—can't be accomplished until you get out of Antiquity and start the Exploration Age. But as the Reddit poster above discovered, just because you can't cross the ocean doesn't mean you can't see across the ocean.

Modders are already improving the UI and adding larger maps

It's no secret Civ 7 is off to a rocky start, and one of the biggest issues seems to be general unhappiness with the UI. Naturally, modders have already sprung into action and there are a few UI-related mods available despite Civ 7's global launch only happening yesterday. Fast work! There are already some tooltip improvements and more functionality when clicking on city banners, so if you're struggling with the UI you should consider giving them a try.

Another mod has entered beta and adds bigger map sizes, from "large" to "giant" to "ludicrous," though the biggest are just there for testing and aren't playable yet.

I'm sure there are plenty more on the way, but here are a few early Civ 7 mods you should check out.

Third Civ 7 patch makes fixes to, you guessed it, the UI

Firaxis continues to issue patches for Civ 7, and like the last one, patch 1.0.1 addresses some issues with the UI, one of the "key areas of player-reported issues that we can act on most quickly," Firaxis said.

You can read all about Civilization 7's 1.0.1 patch here, and there are bigger fixes on the way.

"We're still actively working on a development roadmap outlining more major updates to the game, including improvements to the UI and other critical areas," Firaxis said on Steam. "Our goal is to share this roadmap in the coming weeks; we appreciate your patience as we determine what we can deliver in the near future."

How does victory work in Civilization VII?

There are six ways to win in Civ 7:

• Conquer everyone else's capital cities
• Complete Operation Ivy (the first hydrogen bomb test)
• Complete the World's Fair
• Launch the first Staffed Space Flight
• Establish a World Bank branch in all capital cities
• If none of the above happen by the end of the Modern Age, the player with the most Legacy Points wins

What are Legacy Points?

Each age has four Legacy Paths with their own objectives, which fall into the four categories of Economic, Military, Science, and Cultural. Completing objectives along this track will give you Legacy Points. At the end of the Antiquity and Exploration Ages, these can be redeemed for bonuses that will carry forward into the next age. In the Modern Age, finishing any Legacy Path will grant you access to a game-ending special project.

Antiquity Age Legacy Paths

Culture: Wonders of the Ancient World

This one is very simple. You just have to build a bunch of Wonders.

• Construct 2 Wonders: 1 Legacy Point
• Construct 4 Wonders: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Wondrous Heritage Legacy (+1 Culture and Happiness on Wonders) in the Exploration Age
• Construct 7 Wonders: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Wonders of the Ancient World Golden Age (Amphitheaters retain their yields and adjacency bonuses) in the Exploration Age

Military: Pax Imperatoria

This path is all about controlling Settlements, so you could complete some of its objectives simply by settling more yourself and never firing a shot. But you won't really be able to get all of the rewards that way without going way over your Settlement limit, since it requires 12 Settlements for the Golden Age and your Settlement limit at the end of the Antiquity Age will probably be around six or seven. But conquered settlements count as two, encouraging you to start some fights.

• Control 6 Points Worth of Settlements (Captured Settlements count as 2): 1 Legacy Point
• Control 9 Points Worth of Settlements: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Fealty Legacy (+2 Settlement Limit) in the Exploration Age
• Control 12 Points Worth of Settlements: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Pax Imperatoria Golden Age (Get a free Infantry unit for every Settlement you captured in Antiquity) in the Exploration Age

Science: Great Library

This one is a little bit more complicated. You will need to acquire and display Codices. Some of these you can get straight from the tech tree, such as for completing the Masteries for The Wheel, Currency, Navigation, Engineering, Military Training, Mathematics. They can also come from becoming the suzerain of a Scientific City-State, or exploring points of interest with your Scouts. They won't actually count toward the victory though if you don't have a place to display them, though, so you'll want to keep building Libraries (unlocked by Writing) and eventually Academies (unlocked by Mathematics).

• Display 3 Codices: 1 Legacy Point
• Display 6 Codices: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Collector of Knowledge Legacy (+1 Science for every Codex in Antiquity) in the Exploration Age
• Display 10 Codices: 1 Legacy point, and unlock the Great Library Golden Age (Academies retain their yields and adjacency bonuses) in the Exploration Age

Economic: Silk Roads

Another pretty simple one. You just need to assign Resources to your cities. Some of this can be accomplished by settling near new Resources, but the main way to get them is to train Merchants and create trade routes with City-States and other civs. Having some towns with the Trade Outpost specialization really helps here if you run out of valid trade partners, since it's one of the only ways to increase your trade range. But in a pinch, you might just have to settle closer to some new players. Also keep in mind that you can renew the "Improve Trade Relations" diplomatic pact multiple times, and you get a new trade route slot with that leader every time. Also, you might need to turn more of your towns into cities and build economic buildings like Markets just to have enough amenity slots available to complete the objective.

• Slot 7 Resources: 1 Legacy Point
• Slot 14 Resources: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Master Caravaneer Legacy (+5 Gold for every trade route in Antiquity) in the Exploration Era
• Slot 20 Resources: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Silk Roads Golden Age (All your cities from the previous age remain cities, instead of having all of them but the capital downgrade to towns) in the Exploration Age

Exploration Age Legacy Paths

Culture: Toshakhana

Codices have been replaced by Relics in this era. Similarly, you need buildings like Temples to display them in, or they won't count. The main way you get Relics is by researching Masteries in the Civics tree and converting new cities to your religion, after you found one upon building your first Temple. Your chosen Reliquary Belief will determine exactly how this works. It could grant you relics for converting City-States or enemy capitals, for example. Wonders remain somewhat important, because they represent some of the only buildings besides Temples that can give more Relic slots.

• Display 6 Relics: 1 Legacy Point
• Display 9 Relics: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Deep Roots Legacy (+2 Culture for every Relic in Exploration) in the Modern Age
• Display 12 Relics: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Toshakhana Golden Age (Your Founder Beliefs remain active, allowing you to continue to benefit from settlements following your religion, whereas normally they would become inactive) in the Modern Age

Economic: Treasure Fleets

This one is a bit tricky, because it relies on a concept called "Distant Lands" that requires some amount of experience and intuition to identify. In general, it's not enough just to be on a different continent, but also separated from your start position by Open Ocean tiles, which can only be crossed in the Exploration Era and forward. The one sure way to know if you're looking at Distant Lands is to mouse over a resource and see if the tooltip says it will generate Treasure Fleets for you.

And not all resources in Distant Lands will do this! Only specific treasure resources, which tend to be the famous ones from the real-world Age of Sail like gold, silver, coffee, and spices. Having a settlement in distant lands built on top of these resources will periodically spawn a treasure fleet, which you will then have to safely sail back to your home continent to score points. You'll want to start exploring and settling very early for this one, since you can't really do much to speed up how quick the fleets spawn. And if you start too late, it simply becomes impossible to finish. I would say it's the most difficult Legacy Path in Civ 7.

• Unload 10 Treasure Fleets: 1 Legacy Point
• Unload 20 Treasure Fleets: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Tap the Source Legacy (+2 Gold for every unique Resource you have) in the Modern Age
• Unload 30 Treasure Fleets: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Treasure Fleets Golden Age (All your cities from the previous age remain cities, instead of having all of them but the capital downgrade to towns, and your cities in Distant Lands gain 2 Population) in the Modern Age

Military: Non Sufficit Orbis

Latin for, "You Must Construct Additional Pylons," this follows the theme of Military Legacies wanting you to own a lot of settlements, but only the ones in Distant Lands count. This time, settlements count for double if you conquered them militarily, or if they follow your religion. And if it's a conquered settlement that also follows your religion, both bonuses apply, and it's worth four points.

• Control 4 Points Worth of Settlements in Distant Lands: 1 Legacy Point
• Control 8 Points Worth of Settlements in Distant Lands: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Land of Opportunity Legacy (+10 Production for settlements in Distant Lands) in the Modern Age
• Control 12 Points Worth of Settlements in Distant Lands: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Non Sufficit Orbis Golden Age (Gain a free Infantry and Ranged unit in all of your settlements in Distant Lands) in the Modern Age

Science: Enlightenment

Thank goodness, another simple one. Starting in the Exploration Age, when your city gains a new point of population, you can place it on an existing Urban tile as a Specialist, buffing that tile, instead of developing a new tile. This allows you to create single tiles with a huge amount of productivity. You'll need to pick up techs like Education and Urban Planning to increase the number of Specialists per tile to make the most of it.

• Achieve a total combined yield of 40 or more in one tile (City-Centers don't count): 1 Legacy Point
• Achieve a total combined yield of 40 or more in three tiles (City-Centers don't count): 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Lyceums Legacy (+3 Science on each Quarter) in the Modern Age
• Achieve a total combined yield of 40 or more in five tiles (City-Centers don't count): 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the Enlightenment Golden Age (Universities retain their yields and adjacency bonuses) in the Modern Age

Modern Age Legacy Paths

New to this age, every Legacy Path has one or more ways to win the game instantly.

Economic: Railroad Tycoon

Oh boy, oh jeez, this is another kind of complicated one. To put it as simply as possible, you get points toward this Legacy for each city that has three things: a Rail Station (unlocked by Industrialization), a Factory (unlocked by Mass Production), and a slotted Factory Resource (it largely seems arbitrary which resources become "Factory Resources" in the Modern Age, but they are at least easy to tell apart from others). A key tip here is that you can only have one kind of factory resource per city, but you can slot as many copies of that resource as you want.

When all of the above conditions are fulfilled, the city will start generating Railroad Tycoon Points for every Factory Resource you have slotted, and there don't seem to be many ways to speed it up. So, like Treasure Fleets, you really want to get the infrastructure up and running as fast as possible. Any towns you aren't going to convert into cities should probably be given the Factory Town designation if they're eligible.

• 150 Railroad Tycoon Points: 1 Legacy Point
• 300 Railroad Tycoon Points: 1 Legacy Point
• 500 Railroad Tycoon Points: 1 Legacy Point, and spawns a Great Banker in the Capital
• Victory Condition: The Great Banker must visit every remaining capital and spend a cost of Gold and Influence to establish a World Bank branch

Military: Ideology

Guess what? You need to capture some Settlements! Settling them yourself doesn't count anymore. You'll get one point for every Settlement you capture for the first time if you haven't yet joined an Ideology. You join an Ideology by first researching Political Theory, and then taking your pick of Democracy, Fascism, or Communism. At that point, all captured Settlements become worth two points. And if the Settlement was owned with someone with a different ideology, it's worth three.

• Capture 10 Points Worth of Settlements: 1 Legacy Point
• Capture 15 Points Worth of Settlements: 1 Legacy Point
• Capture 20 Points Worth of Settlements: 1 Legacy Point, unlock the Manhattan Project Wonder (lets you make nukes once completed)
• Victory Condition: After completing the Manhattan Project Wonder, you can start the Operation Ivy Project (the first hydrogen fusion bomb), which will immediately win the game once completed since nobody even dares to mess with you at that point.

Science: Space Race

Pretty straightforward! You need to get ahead in tech and complete a series of aerospace-related milestones.

• Build an Aerodrome (unlocked by Flight) and complete the Trans-Oceanic Flight Project: 1 Legacy Point
• Research Aerodynamics and complete the Break The Sound Barrier Project: 1 Legacy Point
• Build a Launch Pad (unlocked by Rocketry) and complete the Launch Satellite Project: 1 Legacy Point, and unlocks the Staffed Space Flight Project
• Victory Condition: Complete the Staffed Space Flight Project

Culture: Geographic Society

Codices? Relics? Sounds like old news. We're interested in Artifacts now. Which are… also really old. But, you know, you get the point, right? You'll be training Explorers to go dig up old stuff, mostly belonging to other people, and bringing it back to show off at home. Visiting any science building reveals Exploration Age dig sites, and researching Hegemony will open up Antiquity Age ones. You'll need to build Museums to actually display them and have them count toward victory. You know the drill at this point.

• Display 5 Artifacts: 1 Legacy Point
• Display 10 Artifacts: 1 Legacy Point
• Display 15 Artifacts: 1 Legacy Point, and unlock the World's Fair Wonder
• Victory Condition: Complete the World's Fair Wonder

Winning without a victory condition

There are many ways to leave your mark on history in Civ 7. You can also always ignore all of the above and simply conquer everyone if you want. Or you can dabble in everything and simply take home the high score when the Modern Age ends. Of course, if you see someone else getting close to any of those objectives, it might be time to pay them a visit. Possibly with nukes.

Founded in the pre-SVGA age of gaming antiquity, Civilization's randomised yet celebratory take on human history has stood the test of time. Over three decades on, you can still put me down in front of any of the games in the series and I will spend half my waking hours for a week straight guiding my people through the ages via war, diplomacy, exploration, culture-bombing, and plonking down World Wonders before my rivals.

Over its first several entries, the series rapidly evolved to better encapsulate the vibrancy and madness of human history in a turn-based strategy format. But in more recent outings, it's become more about rejigging rather than revolutionising that cavemen-to-cosmos saga.

Yes, Civilization 5 de-stacked units made warfare more tactical, while Civ 6 spread cities across multiple tiles to allow for more focused, thoughtful city management. But in areas like diplomacy, religion, and warfare, changes have offered alternative ways to make fun these phenomena of human history rather than pursuing some goal of 'The Ultimate Civ Experience'. This is reflected in the fact that both Civilization 5 and 6 enjoy huge player numbers to this day; 5 is tight and balanced, 6 is big, bold, and systems-heavy, both are brilliant.

Many of the design decisions in Civilization 7 appear to be in the name of brevity and pacing, with quite a few major systems trimmed in the process. It’s still Civilization, and will still leave you snapping out of it wondering where the last few hours went, but series fans be warned: things are different now.

New age

Let's begin with the broad strokes, and the boldest idea that Civ 7 introduces: Age transitions. Leaders and civilisations have now been separated: you keep the same leader throughout a game, but your civ will change. Each game is split into three Ages—Antiquity, Exploration, Modern—and each time you move into a new one, time skips several hundred years, and you pick from one of a bunch of new civs to lead, specific to that era. So you may start with Egypt in Antiquity, then move onto Normans in the Exploration Age, before landing on the good ol' US of A to see you through the Modern Era. Each civ has some unique units, bonuses, and a dedicated civic tree with special policies, some of which you can carry over into the next era's civ as 'Traditions.'

That age transition is, by design, far from seamless. As you near the end of an Age, which all civs collectively reach by making progress down four linear Legacy Paths, the world will face some kind of crisis, such as plague or barbarian invasions. Once the crisis reaches its head, the current iteration of your civilisation collapses, and you pick a new one to build over its foundations.

Building on the Golden/Dark Age system introduced in the Civ 6 Rise and Fall DLC, your achievements of the previous era unlock boons for the next one. These achievements are acquired through four linear Legacy Paths—Economic, Cultural, Military, and Science—which reset at the start of each Age, with new goals relevant to that age. The more milestones you reach in each Legacy Path, the more Legacy Points you have to spend on special boons at the start of the next era, until you reach the Modern Age, where each Legacy Path leads to a victory condition. There's a hint of the roguelike about it, as your foot-up in the next era is built on your efforts of the previous one, while also setting you back to something of a new beginning.

From a pacing perspective, this works wonders, because at the point in previous games where things would start getting a bit stodgy in terms of unit clutter, city micromanagement, and losing players basically being out of the victory race by the midway point, Civ 7 speeds things up and narrows the gap between the haves and have-nots. The Legacy Path victory conditions include some quite attainable ones, such as digging up artefacts for the Culture path, or industrialising your nation with railways and factories for the Economic one, and it's not unthinkable that players who were flagging for much of the game to pull a smash-and-grab victory out of the bag. It certainly keeps things more suspenseful right up to the end.

Problems of modernity

Each era ushers in new game systems. For instance, religion only gets introduced in the Exploration Age, as does the concept of 'Distant Lands', which unlocks new luxury resources that you can return to your homeland via treasure fleets (the settlement of Distant Lands is also at the heart of the Military Legacy Path for this age).

By the Modern Age, the function and yields of luxuries from the Exploration Age changes, as they're no longer exotic luxuries but common commodities that can be slotted into factories for bigger bonuses. In the modern age also, the ideologies of fascism, democracy, and communism come into play, each with their own civic trees and effects on relations with other civs. This is all good stuff, making each era feel somewhat self-contained and defined by unique goals and mechanics. It does mean that such joyful scenarios as phalanx spearmen resolutely poking at tanks, or cavemen smacking helicopters out of the sky with clubs are now gone, but if you want that, then you're spoiled for choice with the preceding six games.

The soft resets and feature-drip of the Age system does a lot to keep the game fresh, but the Modern Age still feels weakest. Turn times don't drag as much as in earlier games thanks to nice touches like the ability to stack military units into Commanders, and to instantly move troops between cities that have railway stations, but it lacks the focus of the ages that precede it. It's a shame that Firaxis cut the World Congress from this outing—which allowed civs to vote on resolutions, global policies, and engage in diplomatic skulduggery like banning pearls to undermine the civs that depend on them—because it would've been the perfect thing to spice up the late game.

Getting resourceful

Civ's age-old system of citizen management, whereby you could manually assign a city's population to work specific tiles as a way of adjusting a city's focus, has been replaced by slottable resources. So if you've just built a town, you can send it plenty of grub to accelerate growth, or send some gypsum over to a new distant land city that'll give it a nice big production boost. In my relatively short time with the game so far, I've even managed to find some dirty little tricks with resource-slotting, like adding several camels to a city to increase its resource capacity, then building the Tomb of Askia Wonder to grant it extra gold and production for each resource in that city; I'm sure savvier Civvers than myself will find plenty of ways to meta the hell out of this new system.

The idea of distributing resources throughout your empire to where they're most needed is a sensible one, but by the late game I had gotten a bit fatigued with the resource screen, which winds up containing dozens of little resource icons to manually micromanage. Also, you can only chop-and-change resource distribution in cities when you acquire new resources, so you no longer get those nail-biting rushes to complete a Wonder before your rivals, where you'd temporarily send a city into production overdrive, speed-build some logging camps, and deforest the surrounding area to generate as much production as quickly as possible.

Cities are now divided into urban districts (which can accommodate two buildings each) and rural ones. This means that you have a bit more fluidity about how you want to specialise a city, if at all. In fact, the ability to build over the previous age's buildings almost beckons you to shift a city's production focus across eras. For instance, a city that you founded in Antiquity as a military border stronghold might not have that same purpose a thousand years later once your borders have expanded, so why not turn it into a lucrative economic hub for the Exploration Age?

Workers, or Builders, who were previously used to improve empty tiles around your empire, have been done away with altogether, victims to automation. Instead, each time a city grows you get to instantly upgrade one tile in its vicinity with rural improvements like mines, farms, and plantations. And while I miss certain builder actions like the aforementioned forest clearances for quick-and-dirty production boosts, on balance this is a sensible cut, reducing unit clutter while retaining a key aspect of city improvement.

International relations

A little too often, however, Civ 7's fat-trimming cuts into the lean part of the meat as well, losing some richness and flavour in the process. Diplomacy, for instance, feels very thin, and interactions with other leaders a little too transactional. Where before they'd come voicing their opinions on certain actions of yours, share little aphorisms, partake in gossip, or ask you to move your armies away from their borders, they now mainly come to you with offers for generic repeatable agreements.

They're a lot less sassy this time round, and therefore less characterful (and maybe this is just film-studies-graduate-over-analytical wankery bubbling up, but the fact that they're no longer looking out from the screen at you, but side-on at the leader you picked, makes me feel a bit detached from these interactions, like I'm the translator at their meeting rather than a leader).

Gone also is the freewheeling bargaining system where you could demand, say, a city, 5 gold per turn, and a sheep, from enemies in exchange for peace. For a start, resources are now automatically acquired from other civs when you establish trade routes, so you can't lord over other civs by hogging or demanding extortionate prices for valuable resources that they desire. The only bargaining chips in peace treaties are cities, which the AI seems all too eager to give away; there was one point where an alliance I had meant that I was technically at war with someone way on the other side of the world, and despite having not once encountered them in battle, they offered me one of their cities in exchange for peace. Obviously, I said yes, but it was bizarre.

Austerity measures

This iteration of Civilization is also weirdly, well, civil. City-States and barbarians from previous games have been rolled into Independent Power—some start off hostile and effectively act as barbarians, but all can be befriended by spending enough Influence (a new currency used for every diplomatic interaction). Once you start the befriending process, you're basically guaranteed to become their suzerain for the rest of the age unless they get wiped out.

There are no more city-state quests, and no more tussling among civs for the support of these small but important powers via envoys or outright bribery. It relegates what was once an interesting and sneaky way to gain diplomatic leverage to, effectively, the single click of a button. Espionage has received similar treatment, reducing its scope to several fairly low-impact actions, such as Steal Technology, Hinder Military Production, and Hinder Research, that you spend Influence to carry out. No more sabotaging Wonder production, spy networks, or—Civ 4, how I miss thee—feeling like you're running your own MI5-style spy agency.

Religions and governments have also faced severe cuts. Religion somehow manages to feel both unrewarding and frustratingly hands-on to actually play, and simply involves sending missionaries to convert other cities (which you have to do on both an urban and rural tile if that city already has a religion). Converted cities no longer passively spread religion, there are no religious diplomatic effects, nor is there any of that wild religious combat that saw inquisitors striking missionaries down with divine lightning in Civ 6. Seeing as religion played a major part in each series game dating back to Civilization 4, it's disappointing that over two decades on it's been reduced to something so superfluous.

As for governments, you are locked into picking one per era, and all it does outside of minor diplomatic sway is affect what your choice of boosts for a bunch of turns is each time your civ enters a period of Celebration (achieved by accruing Happiness). Reducing, say, Theocracy to the occasional binary choice between a temporary Culture boost or production boost for 10 turns just doesn't feel like a substantial reflection of that government type's impact on a nation. Like religion, it feels like a backwards step for the series in the name of streamlining.

A looming legacy

To be clear, most of Civ 7's shortcomings are relative to the two very fleshed out and still popular games preceding it in the series, which for me still remain at the head of the genre. I still lost track of time and reality playing it, and there are some pretty clear improvements here. Games tick along at a more even pace thanks to some clever ways of addressing unit clutter, and war feels great (even if the AI can't entirely handle its tactical complexity). Newly navigable rivers have legitimate strategic value too, and I've had some great times sending dreadnoughts upriver deep into enemy civ territory to effectively bombard them from within.

I'm also happy to see the art style build on the more grounded one of Civ 5 rather than the divisive cartoon stylings of Civ 6 (something about dropping nukes on cities that looked like they were made out of gingerbread never sat right with me). Speaking of presentation though, the UI isn't great; it often requires one too many clicks to get the details you want, there's no shortcut key to scroll through units, nor a way to get an overview of all your units on the map. Where similar games use nested menus and text highlighting to give you quick info about key concepts, in Civ 7 I'd need to go and type things into the Civilopedia to get basic info on things like building effects or unit combat bonuses.

Civilization 7 feels like a reaction to the maximalism of its predecessor: sleeker and speedier, colder and less complex. Being the first game in the series to come out on consoles at the same time as PC, I can't help but feel that some of the complexity cutbacks are made with gamepad players in mind. Some of these cuts are positive, and they help the game flow better (especially, I imagine, in multiplayer), but the simplification of systems like religion, diplomacy, city-states, and espionage means that the journey through history doesn't feel quite as rich or rewarding.

It's as if Civ's gone through its own age transition—a few steps forward, a few steps back. While it's addressed some longstanding issues, there's a little too much that's been stripped away for veterans like myself to call this meaningful progress on the legendary series' Legacy Path.

If you’ve never played the original Defender’s Quest (which still holds up to this day), what you’re getting here is old-school numberwang tower defense. Waves of increasingly tough and devious critters travel across a maze to kick over your base, and you’ve got to stop them before that happens. Rather than spamming walls and towers, the Defender’s Quest games have you managing a party of heroes, levelling them up and equipping them, min-maxing skill trees and boosting their strength (or relocating them) using the resources you build up within each mission. And for when push really comes to shove, you can spend some of your energy on special powers to slow or directly damage enemies that might have slipped past your net.

This sequel doesn’t shake up the first game’s formula too much, although the characters and their abilities are a bit more distinct and unusual, like a character that can teleport between two points or a high-cost colossus that requires four tiles to place, encouraging fresh strategies. Where Defender’s Quest 2 doesn’t retread old ground is in its setting and story. While the first game was pretty boilerplate swords and sorcery, this game is set in a lurid, pseudo-oceanic science-fantasy world where the rich and powerful live on a shrinking archipelago of islands above a sea of reality-warping fog, and crews of bounty hunters and pirates travel above and below the ‘tide’ on biomechanical land-ships, battling each other and the monsters spawned from below.

It’s all depicted through some lovely watercolor comic-style art, big chunky sprites in battle and featuring a very unusual cast of characters, all brought to life by Xalavier Nelson Jr (most recently behind I Am Your Beast and El Paso Elsewhere), who in a previous life was also a PC Gamer contributor. As you might expect, he doesn’t hold back on the jokes (a hallmark of the first game), but the tone is somewhat heavier here than in the original, as the cast wrestle with their own demons in-between smacking seven shades out of pseudo-sea monsters.

As a final aside, about 10 missions into Defender’s Quest 2, I had an epiphany: This all feels a lot like narrative-heavy mobile tower defense hit Arknights. And then it clicked that the original game must have been pretty influential. Maybe they still do make them like they used to. While Defender’s Quest 2 doesn’t feel quite cutting edge anymore, I can only hope that it draws a fraction of the players that Chinese studio Hypergryph introduced to the formula in the intervening years. Defender’s Quest 2: Mist Of Ruin is out now on Steam for £15.07/$17.99.

Those two paid updates are named "Crossroads of the World" and "Right to Rule", each adding new civs, new leaders, and new natural wonders. Crossroads of the World arrives hot on the heels of the game's launch, dropping in two parts across March. Early March will introduce Victorian mathematician Ada Lovelace as a playable leader, as well as four new natural wonders and Carthage and Great Britain as playable civilizations. The rest of the DLC will arrive a couple of weeks later, letting you conquer the world as South American revolutionary Simon Bolivar, and play with the cultures of Bulgaria and Nepal.

The second paid DLC "Right to Rule", will declare its legitimacy sometime between April and September. The specifics of this pack aren't as detailed, but the update will bring two new leaders, four new civs, and four new world wonders.

As is customary these days, each paid pack will launch in tandem with a free update. Complementing the first part of Crossroads of the World, is a free new event called "Natural Wonder Battle", as well as a new natural wonder, the Bermuda Triangle—one of the top three irrational fears of every child alongside quicksand and piranhas. With the second part of Crossroads, all players will get Mount Everest as a natural wonder, accompanied by the "Marvelous Mountains" event. Further free updates will coincide with the launch of Right to Rule, but again, 2k doesn't specify what those updates will involve.

That's a fair chunk of extra content, although I reckon Civilization 7's long term success is far more likely to hinge upon how its changes are received. The sequel takes some big swings in altering the underlying experience. Robert Zak already discussed the significance of these changes in his recent preview, remarking on how its age transitions "may be the most radical, disruptive mechanic in the history of the series." But that disruption is likely to be contentious among players, as it denies players the ability to guide a single Civ through the entire course of history. Early access for Civilization 7 starts on February 6, so we'll find out exactly how the new recipe tastes in a matter of days.

Keep scrolling for an overview of what's out on PC in February 2025, and for a more zoomed-out view of what's coming out on PC this year, check out our full list of 2025's new PC games.

February's big PC release dates

February gaming events

• The Six Invitational Rainbow Six Siege tournament runs February 3-16.
• D.I.C.E. Summit , an industry event in Las Vegas, is happening February 11-13—we'll be on location for coverage.
• PGL Cluj Napoca is a CS2 tournament running February 14-23.
• Steam Next Fest, where a gazillion game demos flood Steam, starts on February 24.

More games releasing in February

• February 3: Spirit Swap — "action-puzzle meets narrative game" (Steam)
• February 4: Blood Bar Tycoon — run a vampire bar (Steam)
• February 5: Rift of the NecroDancer — rhythm combat (Steam)
• February 6: Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator — EMT sim (Steam)
• February 6: Keep Driving — road trip RPG (Steam)
• February 6: Sworn — Arthurian roguelike (Steam)
• February 7: Slender Threads — paranormal point and click (Steam)
• February 7: A Game About Digging A Hole — what the title says (Steam)
• February 12: Legacy: Steel & Sorcery — fantasy extraction (Steam)
• February 12: Urban Myth Dissolution Center — occult mysteries (Steam)
• February 13: Dawnfolk — minimalist city builder (Steam)
• February 14: Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak 2 (Steam)
• February 14: Tomb Raider IV-VI Remastered — classic collection (Steam)
• February 18: Lost Records: Bloom and Rage — Life is Strange devs' latest (Steam)
• February 20: Era One — strategy in space (Steam)
• February 20: Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii — pirate Yakuza... in Hawaii (Steam)
• February 21: Die in the Dungeon — or try not to? (Steam)
• February TBD: Midnight Murder Club — past my bedtime sorry (Steam)
• February TBD: Tiny Pasture — desktop pets are back, baby (Steam)

The last thing I need in my life is another factory game, if only because allowing any factory game into your life risks it being consumed entirely by its sprawling, hopelessly absorbing logistics puzzle. But then Cordyceps Collective went and mashed up Factorio with last year's colony simulation Empire of the Ants, and now I see I'm going to lose the second half of February to Microtopia.

Releasing in just a few weeks, Microtopia invites players to "become the hive mind of a robot ant colony" designing logistics networks for your automaton insects to produce and convey resources across an elegant industrial circuit-board. Starting with a robotic ant queen, you must nurse cute metal larvae into baby ants, draw pathways to tell them where to move, and place down sensors and logic gates to instruct them on how to interact with your factory. Collecting resources and placing down structures lets you upgrade your ants into different types, like flying ants, digger ants, and, er, "inventor" ants, which presumably help you research new tech.

You aren't limited to one factory in Microtopia either. Once you've established a colony, you can fly new queens to different biomes and start afresh, experimenting with additional plant species that can be processed into new resources. There's also an ecological factor to Microtopia, with your colony producing pollution that you can choose to mitigate or ignore.

The trailer, which you can view above, provides a brief overview of Microtopia's elegant logic systems and motherboard-like factory structures, while there's also a demo available for anyone who wants to take a closer look. The full game releases on February 18, which isn't far away at all, although that pits it against some heavy-hitters like Avowed and Monster Hunter: Wilds.

At least it isn't competing directly with other factory games, since all the bigger names in industrial automation opened for business last year. This included the excellent Satisfactory, which arrived in September 2024 after five years in Steam early access, while Factorio's long in-gestation Space Age expansion blasted off a month later (blowing my tiny mind in the process). Time will tell whether Microtopia proves as involved or elaborate as those games, although the last few moments of the trailer imply your factories can have some scale to them.

GGG released PoE in 2013, and since then it has released significant updates on a regular basis. The studio had promised that, after the release of PoE2, it would maintain both games simultaneously, and continue to support PoE with expansions.

"And we do intend to keep that promise," says Rogers. "But it's certainly been a lot harder to deliver on it than what we expected."

Rogers says the trouble started after the release of PoE expansion Settlers of Kalguur in July 2024, at which point the plan was to release update 3.26 in late October just before the launch of PoE2 in early access.

"But we just didn't think we could do it," says Rogers. "It was too close to the huge circus that was the organisation around PoE 2's launch. But we also didn't want to launch it immediately after PoE2 either. So that kind of ruled out December." Eventually the studio settled on February because "we didn't think it was possible to do it any earlier than that."

It was, unfortunately, only storing up problems. "PoE2's end game needed a lot of work," says Rogers. "Having the guys on the PoE1 team help out for three months on PoE2 [before launch], given that 3.26 was seven months away, seemed like a no-brainer and man did PoE2 need it. The problem is we got to the middle of October and PoE2's launch was imminent, and I'll tell you what, taking people off PoE2 at that point was impossible. The endgame was not in a shippable state but, you know what, if the PoE team just kept helping until PoE2 shipped in late November, we could still do it… we just needed to ship this damn game first, get it out of the way, we literally couldn't think about anything else until it was done."

Rogers admits "we were fooling ourselves" because, after PoE2 launched, it immediately ran into a whole host of its own problems that needed fixing. "How could we think about making a PoE expansion when we still have hundreds of thousands of people having a bad experience in PoE 2? There are crashes, there are severe endgame balance problems, how could I justify taking some of the most experienced developers we have off PoE2 when it's on fire?"

After Christmas GGG's management assessed the situation and came to a fairly reasonable conclusion. "The most urgent priority was getting PoE2 to a point where it didn't have major issues," says Rogers. "And it's hard to even think about what PoE needs when PoE2 has obvious problems that need fixing."

And here comes the bad news. "We can't really work on PoE 3.26 until PoE2 0.2.0 has shipped. And then, being honest, we probably need to support that for a couple of weeks after that as well. [But] once 0.2.0 is done I promise we will divert as many resources as are needed from our company to get 3.26 done as soon as possible."

The bit that really has people up in arms: "Unfortunately I just can't promise a date right now," admits Rogers. "I'm really sorry for how this went down. Honestly I should have predicted the fact that taking the PoE team off PoE1 would lead to this outcome.

"And I probably should have resisted doing it, but at every stage I just kept thinking 'we still have time, we still have time.' And then we didn't have time anymore."

Rogers ends by thanking players for their support, and saying "you guys do deserve better than this, and we will get 3.26 out as fast as we can."

As corporate mea culpas go, I don't think that's a bad one. The reasoning is fairly straightforward and Rogers comes across as honest and talking to the game's audience like the grown-ups they are. But of course, however it's delivered, this is bad news for PoE fans.

Visit the subreddit if you want to see players in the territory of pure cope, because this news of a delay is being treated like PoE has just been read the last rites. There are claims that PoE is somehow now a "scam", or that GGG is preparing to "pull the plug" on the original game, and plenty of hand-on-hips talk about "obligations to the customers."

Some fans are digging through previous interviews for signs that GGG knew this was coming, therefore proving… something? The hair-rending is such that one player even suggested renaming the subreddit to Grave of Exile.

You want memes? Dead man walking, "PoE1 is kil", long live the king, Reviewbrah, heck let's get some Berzerk up in this.

Weirdly enough, the Berzerk post is one of the more philosophical about the situation, though again the whiff of copium is undeniable. "Whatever has happened is in the past, and whatever is ahead—good or bad—will pass as well," says the one-and-only N00bWarrior. "I don’t want this to weigh on me anymore. I need to make peace with myself and let go of this burden.

"To me, PoE and PoE 2 are like the legendary Dragonslayer sword wielded by Guts. Even Guts, with all his strength and determination, cannot carry two Dragonslayers at the same time. Perhaps GGG needs to accept this truth as well. Even guys like GGG cannot support two massive games at the same time."

There is a whole load of this existential-leaning stuff. "Worst case scenario just happened," says OanSur. "It's not a delay, it's admitting that they pulled people away from PoE1 to focus on PoE2 and the release of anything PoE1 related is highly unlikely."

Its over, we're done guys from r/pathofexile

"You will always be remembered" from r/pathofexile

Press F to Pay Respects from r/pathofexile

I do feel like it's worth pointing out at this stage nobody has died. And Path of Exile is not being abandoned by GGG: It is clear from the apology video that the studio's intention is to work on the game again.

That does of course remain to be seen, and I wouldn't want to come across as wholly credulous. But there is a wider question of naivety and expectations here: PoE was first released in October 2013 and has received countless updates and expansions for more than a decade. It is hardly surprising that the studio's focus has shifted to the 2024 sequel that currently has hundreds of thousands of daily players, but for some that's a personal grievance. You see this with other games, like Vermintide, where devotees of the original act permanently wounded that the studio dared to move on to a sequel.

GGG probably shouldn't have committed to supporting PoE simultaneously with PoE2, or at least should have been clearer about what that would mean in terms of update cadence and the studio's focus generally. But I don't think it's executed some kind of rug-pull here or means to deceive any of the PoE playerbase: It feels like it's belatedly gotten to grips with the problem, realised it can't do everything it wants to do, and is at least communicating that openly. PoE players have every right to be upset by an indefinite delay to their next tranche of content: I'm just not sure it's the end of the world, or of the game itself.

Substantial changes have also been made to how cities grow and how buildings work. I've been playing Civ 7's first two ages ahead of the launch, and can get you started with a basic understanding of this revised settlement system. Let's start with some definitions before we jump into how it all works:

• Settlement: The collective term for cities and towns. If a bonus affects settlements, it affects both cities and towns.
• Town: A settlement with no production queue. Production is instead converted into gold, and buildings and units must be purchased with gold. Towns grow like cities at first, and can later be specialized or converted into cities.
• City: You always have at least one city, your capital. Cities have the usual production queue, allowing you to construct buildings and train units without spending gold.

When you start a new game of Civilization 7 in the Antiquity Age, you'll be granted a lone settler, as usual. That settler will always found a city, your capital, but from then on any settlers you train will found towns.

Growing settlements

All of your settlements grow in the same way: When a certain amount of food accumulates in a city or town—the bigger its population, the more food it takes—a new citizen is created, and when that happens you can select a new title to add to the settlement. This is different from Civ 6, where the growth of city borders is connected to culture, not population.

Tiles added to a settlement start as rural tiles, and automatically get an improvement like a mine or plantation. (There are no more workers.)

Alternatively, you can add a specialist to a city when it grows, but I'll get to that later.

How buildings work

In cities, you can construct buildings using the production queue. In towns, they have to be purchased with gold. Either way you do it, you'll be prompted to select one of your settlement's tiles as the building site.

If you place a building on a rural tile, it'll be transformed into an urban tile. You can only create new urban tiles adjacent to other urban tiles, expanding outward from the center of your settlement, which contains a palace or city hall by default. Urban tiles lose their improvements, and are able to house two buildings.

This is a simplification of the district system from Civilization 6, where districts had to be constructed before placing buildings in them, and theming your districts gave you a bonus. In Civ 7, there are special civ-specific buildings that, when placed on the same tile, form a "unique quarter" that provides a bonus, but otherwise you don't need to theme your urban tiles this time.

What you do want to do is pay attention to are adjacency bonuses: a building's resource yields will be bigger or smaller depending on where you place them. The bazaar in the Exploration Age, for instance, gives you +1 gold for each adjacent navigable river tile, coastal tile, or wonder.

The exceptions are warehouse buildings like the granary, which provide bonuses to every rural tile in a settlement with certain improvements, regardless of where the building is placed. Granaries add +1 food to farms, pastures, and plantations, for example.

Warehouse buildings are also ageless, a designation which means that they don't lose their bonuses when you transition from one age to the next. Regular buildings lose their adjacency bonuses when you enter a new age, but you can build over top of them, changing your city over time.

Choosing a town specialization

Cities are just cities, but towns can be specialized. The default specialization for a new town is "Growing Town," which doubles its growth rate. Once the population grows enough, you can select a more specific specialization.

There are two very important details to note here:

• Once selected, a town specialization can't be changed until the next age
• When you specialize a town, it stops growing and starts sending all of its food to connected cities

That second detail means that you can really get your capital growing quickly if you surround it with towns (one player took this so far they broke the game).

Regardless of specialization, towns continue to convert production into gold.

• Fort Town: +5 healing to units and +25 health to walls in this town
• Urban Center: +1 culture and science on quarters (any district with two buildings) in this town
• Farming/Fishing Town: +1 food on farms, pastures, plantations, and fishing boats
• Mining Town: +1 production on camps, woodcutters, clay pits, mines, and quarries (remember that production is gold when it comes to towns)
• Trading Post: +2 happiness to each resource tile in the town and +5 trade route range (Antiquity and Exploration Ages only)
• Religious Site: +2 happiness and +1 relic slot on temples in this town (Exploration Age only)
• Hub Town: +2 influence per settlement connected to this town (Exploration and Modern Ages only)
• Factory Town: Bonus gold towards purchasing a factory, adds an additional resource slot (Modern Age only)

Converting a town into a city

Towns can be converted into a city by spending gold. The amount of gold required seems to decrease with population. You'll see the option at the bottom left of the settlement management screen.

When you transition to a new age, all of your cities except your capital revert to towns, and towns lose their specializations. This allows you to rework your strategy for the new age, but requires some spending to get your cities back.

Specialists

In cities, instead of adding a new tile when your population grows, you can add a specialist to an urban tile, max one per tile. (This sort of replaces the old system where you'd assign citizens to work particular tiles, but it's not quite the same.)

Specialists drain resources (-2 food, -2 happiness), but enhance the adjacency bonuses of the buildings they're assigned to and produce culture and science.

Resources

One of the main reasons to send settlers outward is to lay claim to the various natural resources on the map. When you claim a rural tile with a resource on it—wine, horses, gold, etc—you gain a copy of that resource which gives your civ a bonus.

Some resources are "empire resources," and give your whole civ a bonus. You don't have to do anything with them to get that bonus. Others are "city resources," and must be assigned to a city for their bonuses to take effect. Finally, there are "bonus resources," which can be assigned to cities or towns. (There are a couple other special types that appear later in the game.)

There are various ways to increase the number of resource slots in your cities and towns, which is eventually necessary to take advantage of everything your civ produces.

Capturing settlements

Pro tip: You can make cities very hard to capture in Civilization 7 by stuffing them with a ridiculous number of walls. Every urban tile that has walls becomes a fortified district, and an invader must capture every fortified district in a city to claim it. Turtle power!

Towns, however, are not so defensible: You can only build walls around their central district. This makes it much easier to capture towns, and they change hands much more frequently during wars as a result.

As usual, a captured settlement can be razed or integrated into your civilization, though its citizens won't join you happily. If one of your towns gets really unhappy, its people may revolt and defect to a nearby civ, which is another way they change hands.

On easier modes at least, I've found that AI leaders are very willing to part with towns in exchange for peace when they don't think a war is going their way, but you'll have a harder time getting them to sign over a city.

More info on Civilization 7's settlements

You can read more about how cities and towns work, as well as Firaxis' justifications for the changes it made, in this dev diary on the subject.

I expect some of this streamlining—like tying border growth to food, replacing citizen allocation with specialists, and dropping workers—to be among Civ 7's more controversial changes. I miss some of that detail, though I do like that Civ 6's district system has been simplified (because I didn't like it much in the first place), and now that I've wrapped my head around the importance of building adjacency bonuses, I do enjoy the light spatial city-planning puzzle the system creates.

The two can be recruited in Total War: Warhammer 3 (Gotrek voiced by the perfectly cast Brian Blessed) if you win their quest battle, racing to the rescue to keep them alive when they're about to be overwhelmed by the daemonic hordes of Slaanesh. This is fairly achievable if you're fielding an army with some heavy cavalry who can charge into the middle of the battlefield in time to make a difference, but if you're playing poor stunty dwarfs—who thematically speaking, are one of the armies most likely to recruit the duo—you're kind of boned. Felix would probably break and flee, while Gotrek's suicide wish would be granted before you had time to help them.

Thank goodness for hotfix 6.0.4 then, which addresses this and many other issues. Near the bottom of a list of minor tweaks and fixes is a note that made my day: "Improved Gotrek and Felix’s initial survivability in 'The Adventures of Gotrek and Felix' quest battle (to Gotrek's dismay)."

Ogre players will also be pleased by a change that affects the DLC lord Golgfag Maneater in particular. The mercenary ogre had a playstyle built around sacking settlements rather than occupying them, then using that loot to hire mercs from ogre camps. Golgfag also has buffs that affect the unique units called regiments of renown, but since you can only recruit those in your own territory—and sacked settlements still belong to your enemies—it was a hassle to actually do so. Now, the area around ogre camps count as your territory for the purpose of recruiting regiments of renown, making them easier to add to your horde.

If you've ever experienced the bug where your AI-controlled reinforcements would bundle together in a clump when they arrived instead of actually helping you out, that's been fixed as well, alongside a host of other changes you can read in the full patch notes.

I'm not reviewing Civ 7 myself and I don't know where our reviewer will land on it, but I have been playing a pre-release build and talking to other PC Gamer editors about it. (We can currently share details about parts of the game, but not all of it.) I like Civ 7, but along with all the praise it'll get, I expect sharp criticism, wrathful Steam reviews, and heated Reddit threads as 4X grognards and Civ lifers digest not just how different Civ 7 is, but how they feel about its differences.

As the most dramatic change, Civ 7's ages system has been the natural focal point so far. Rather than leading one civ from early history to the moon, we'll now progress through three distinct ages: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. The transitions between those ages are soft resets that end wars, shuffle city states, and most significantly require picking a new civ for the new age—Han China might transform into Spain, for instance. Because it alters the overall structure of a game of Civ, the ages system feels like an even more significant change than the switch from a square grid to hexes in Civ 5, or the addition of city districts in Civ 6.

Firaxis hopes that breaking up a game of Civ in this way will keep us from getting bored of mid-game micromanagement and starting over—the stats on how many people were actually finishing games of Civ 6 were apparently an eye-opener—and based on what I've played of the first two ages, I think it works as intended. The soft resets do motivate me to plow ahead when things start getting messy and sluggish. But I also miss the feeling that I'm guiding one distinct civ from ancient history to the present day in a straight line—as ahistorical as that sense of total continuity may be, it is a fun fantasy in the context of a game.

Another 4X game, Humankind, tried a similar idea a few years ago. It wasn't a bad game, but neither was it a standout hit (we're a lot more excited for Amplitude's next 4X game), and the cultural mixing-and-matching wasn't the highlight. The choice to try something that wasn't particularly successful in the last 4X game that tried it is going to raise some eyebrows, even if Firaxis has provided lots of design and historical justification for the change.

Beyond that soon-to-be controversial change, Civ 7 is also going to have the same problem every Civ has: Those who've been playing Civilization 6 with the Rise and Fall and Gathering Storm expansions and all the other DLC may find that it feels slight. I like the new diplomacy and espionage system, which is simplified and uses one resource you start gathering immediately, but that streamlining won't necessarily please Civ 6 veterans. Other systems have been pared down, too.

And although I understand why Firaxis did away with workers—training and using them was one of those rote tasks you just had to do—I miss those little guys and I'm sure others will feel the same. Some long-time Civ players still complain about the decision to end unit stacking in Civ 5, so to some degree the critical fracas I expect is just the usual new Civ discourse cycle. When you make changes to series people have been playing for over 30 years, they react.

Strategy sickos should still find plenty of complexity to experiment with in Civ 7—someone has already broken the game by stacking food and growth bonuses to absurd effect—and as for me, I'm a laid-back Civ player. What makes me happy is building the longest unbroken Great Wall I can and then admiring it, and the new environment art is the series' best yet. I've giddily mentioned the simple addition of navigable rivers in several articles, and there are probably lots of casual Civ players out there who also care more about the sandbox than the strategy.

But I also expect some fans to be seriously put off by the omissions and changes, while others will be disappointed that Firaxis didn't do something more radical. Civ 7 is quite different from past Civ games, but I haven't seen anything that 4X diehards are likely to say pushes the genre as a whole forward. So if you're anticipating Civ 7, be prepared to encounter mixed opinions and lots of declarations of "I'm sticking with Civ 6/Civ 5/Soren Johnson games!" I think there'll be a bit of a brawl over this one.

With Civilization 7's new ability to mix-and-match leaders and civs, and all the bonuses available from civics, wonders, and new features like leader attributes, there is a goofy amount of optimizing you can do. While playing a preview build of the game—which isn't out for a couple more weeks yet—YouTuber Drongo decided to see how far they could push it. It's safe to say that they pushed it to its limit, because the game stopped working.

You can watch Drongo's video above. It's sponsored by 2K for a new channel called One More Turn, so consider the praise for Civ 7 with that context in mind, but the mechanics of the game-breaking optimization are the interesting thing to me. It was clear to me from my own experiences previewing Civ 7 that you can go wild with bonus stacking if you want to, but I'm not really the theorycrafting type—I just want to build cool wonders so I can admire them, not because I have some big plan in mind.

Drongo is the other kind of player. I'll leave the full details of this game-breaking build to the video, but the gist is that playing as Confucius with the Khmer civ, Drongo focused all his energy on stacking food and growth bonuses. Just a few of them:

• Confucius grants 25% growth rate in cities
• The Khmer Empire's unique ability prevents urban districts from removing a tile's natural yield, meaning you can build up your city without sacrificing food
• The Khmer Baray improvement increases food in all floodplains in a settlement
• The Khmer Chakravarti Civic increases growth rate in the capital
• He selected multiple leader attributes that increase growth and food production
• He made all his towns specialize in farming

By turn 76, Drongo had stacked around 18 bonuses and was producing 263.5 food per turn. For comparison, at turn 87 in a recent game, I was producing a pathetic 59 food per turn. Granted, I had been playing in exactly the opposite manner: focusing all my energy on pointlessly building a really long Great Wall, purely for aesthetic reasons. (I think that makes my leadership style more historically accurate.)

Sadly, Drongo did not get to create the world's first urban sprawl before the invention of mathematics, because Civilization 7 simply couldn't handle that much food and that many people. At turn 98, he noticed that his capital had stopped growing. Upon further inspection, he discovered that Civ 7 was asking for -1112 food to produce a new citizen. It's not clear why the game invented the concept of anti-food, but it must have something to do with Drongo's absurd agricultural domination.

Firaxis will probably have fixed that bug by the time Civ 7 releases on February 11. Not that I would ever encounter it anyway, since my citizens won't have time for surplus food production with all the pointless building projects I plan to demand of them.

Firaxis' own plans for marking the occasion are less megalomaniacal, though conquest will likely still feature heavily. On February 8, the studio will host the Civ World Summit—a live Civilization 7 tournament that will be streamed online.

Announced on the Civilization website, the Civ world summit will be hosted at the Xperion gaming zone in Hamburg, and involve a multiplayer showdown in Civilization 7 between "five prominent members of the Civ community". Firaxis doesn't explain who these prominent community members are, but does specify who will be hosting it—namely Firaxis' community manager Sarah Engel and "famed Civ creator" PotatoMcWhiskey, in partnership with Rocket Beans TV (there's a collection of nouns for you).

For viewers on Twitch, Firaxis has arranged a Twitch drop to "commemorate" the event, in the form of a 'cavalry charge banner' cosmetic for players' in-game profiles. This can be earned by "watching the Firaxis Games channel or one of the partnered channels". Apparently, Firaxis also has "an exciting announcement" planned for the livestream. I haven't the slightest idea what this could be. It seems a tad early to reveal Civilization VIII, so perhaps it relates to post-launch plans for Civ 7.

Firaxis will provide more information about the Civ World Summit in the "upcoming weeks", though I doubt we'll have to wait too long since we're only three weeks out from the event itself. In any case, if you're in or around Hamburg and you fancy attending the event in person, tickets can be purchased here for the princely sum of five Euros. Otherwise, the event can be viewed on the Firaxis Games Twitch Channel, the Civilization YouTube Channel, or the Civilization Facebook page.

Civilization 7 launches three days after the event on February 11. Early impressions on Firaxis' latest alt-history generator suggest a pretty transformative entry. Robert Zak recently played 20 hours of it, and described its age transitions as "the series' most radical and disruptive mechanic yet".

Age of Empires: Definitive Edition - $4.99

As an atrocious hipster, I have been known to say that Age of Empires gets too much love and that it was never nearly as good as Rise of Nations (also in this list), but there's no denying its huge influence on gaming, or that, when it comes down to it, it's still a lot of fun. And the Definitive Edition, its 4K remaster, is obviously the best way to enjoy it.

Buy on Steam

AI War: Fleet Command - $2.49

A hard-as-nails space RTS where you'll face an AI opponent you'll learn to despise, AI War can be offputtingly challenging but immensely satisfying to master. It's ultimately a guerrilla war against a foe who has stacked the deck against you, boasting fleets that will obliterate you the moment you start to seem like a threat. But it's this arsehole AI opponent, who starts each game with a combination of different behaviours, that makes this RTS so compelling.

Buy on Steam

Company of Heroes - $3.99

The original Company of Heroes remains one of Relic's greatest games. It's a 3D WW2 RTS that managed to innovate in so many different places—physics, destruction, tight squad-based tactics—at a time when the genre was struggling with the push to 3D. I remain a CoH2 defender (especially the Ardennes Assault standalone expansion) and actually really dug CoH3, but this is the one everyone loves without any caveats.

Buy on Steam

Cossacks: Back to War - $1.24

Cossacks: European Wars was one of the first games from Stalker studio GSC Game World, but I've picked its second standalone expansion (which gives you 100 new missions to tackle) since it chucks two extra nations, Switzerland and Hungary, into the mix, along with the ones from European Wars and The Art of War. Imagine Age of Empires, but with mind-bogglingly huge battles and an unlimited number of troops.

Buy on Steam

Darwinia - $3.99

This Tron-inspired indie RTS is surprisingly tricky to describe, despite being in many ways a fairly simple game. It has touches of arcade game brilliance, while also being a squad-based RTS, and there's a dash of Lemmings in there to boot, as you guide and protect your little Darwinians from the viruses infecting your digital world. It's weird and clever and for a few bucks there's no reason why you shouldn't take a punt on this classic.

Buy on Steam

Homeworld Remastered Collection - $3.49

Homeworld remains one of the most impressive RTS romps of all time, and the first two games are much easier to recommend than Homeworld 3, which was stunning to look at but did little to improve upon the formula, and in some cases undermined it. With these two games, you get the genre's greatest campaigns; an endless supply of tense, fully 3D battles; and substantial improvements added by Gearbox, including modding tools.

Buy on Steam

Men of War - $0.74

Men of War 2 finally arrived last year to a muted reception, and it's actually the eighth game in the series. With that in mind, it's not really the best place to start if you're a newcomer, especially if you want a strong singleplayer campaign. For that, you'll want Men of War 1, which is technically the third game in the series (I know, it's confusing). Broadly, it's comparable to CoH, but if you prefer more micromanagement and a more robust simulation of 20th century warfare, this one's for you.

Buy on Steam

Rise of Nations: Extended Edition - $4.99

The initial concept for Age of Empires was 'Civilization, but an RTS'. It ultimately became something else, but that concept lives on in Rise of Nations. It shares a lot of AoE's fundamental mechanics, but you will take your nation from a simple ancient civilisation all the way into the modern era, conquering the world as you go. And unlike a game of Civ, this all happens briskly. Even now it feels ambitious, but it's also impressively digestible, and significantly more playable on modern PCs thanks to the Extended Edition.

Buy on Steam

Stronghold Crusader HD - $2.99

While a fully remastered Definitive Edition is on its way, for a few bucks you can still play an improved version of the classic castle-loving RTS Stronghold Crusader in this HD remaster, which came out in 2012, a decade after the original. Even more than 20 years since its initial launch, there's something incredibly satisfying about besieging castles with up to 10,000 troops. Big castles, big battles, very angry lions—what's not to love?

Buy on Steam

Wargame: European Escalation - $2.49

Eugen's Cold War-turned-hot scenario is still continuing in Warno, but there's a lot to recommend the series that spawned this World War 3 sim. Wargame is my go-to for realistic, combined-arms modern battles, but the large scale and that focus on realism can make it tricky to get into, which is why I reckon you should kick things off with the first game, European Escalation, rather than the later installments. They upped the ante, with more units and complications, but this one eases you into things a lot better, in part thanks to a strong campaign. If you want to get stuck into some meaty multiplayer brawls, though, Warno is a lot more lively.

Buy on Steam

"When we started Amplitude, we always had the vision that we would definitely, every once in a while, revisit our games," says Amplitude CEO and co-founder Romain de Waubert de Genlis. But the studio likes to have a gap between the sequels to, as he puts it, "refresh our crazy minds".

Since the first Endless Legend launched, Amplitude's returned to space 4Xs with Endless Space 2, tackled historical 4Xs with Humankind and experimented with roguelikes twice with Dungeon of the Endless and Endless Dungeon. It's learned some new lessons, split up with its former publisher Sega (Endless Legend 2 will be published by Hooded Horse), and is beginning its next chapter, kicking it off with a return to its most inventive game.

In Endless Legend 2, we're bidding farewell to Auriga, the exotic and evocative setting of the first game, and planting our flag on the new world of Saiadha. Amplitude's not throwing everything out, though. Factions both human and alien will once again be fighting, trading and politicking their way through a sandbox with a strong narrative bent, and as you may have noticed from the trailer and art, we're seeing the return of some familiar faces—namely the Broken Lords and Necrophages factions from EL1.

"You can expect some of the old ones and some new ones as well," says de Waubert de Genlis. At first the plan was just to have new factions in the sequel—until Amplitude started to miss some of the old favourites. "So then we had to pick and choose some that we wanted to bring back with us and link it to the story of the planet, so it makes sense. Basically, it can't happen just by chance that you have these cultures, all these races, all over the universe without a reason."

Ununited nations

We'll be learning more about the factions soon, and Amplitude intends to first release Endless Legend 2 in early access with four of them. I assume—though it's not been confirmed—that they'll go with two returning factions and two new ones. And it's an exciting prospect to both see how the old factions adapt to this new world, and what strange hooks the new ones have. See, one of Endless Legend's best traits is its asymmetrical faction design, where each empire has a dramatically unique playstyle.

The Broken Lords, for instance, are a vampiric, spectral faction who have sacrificed their physical form, and now exist inside ornate suits of armour, feeding off Dust, which in the Endless universe serves as the primary currency. They don't require food, and expanding their population costs cash. The Necrophages, meanwhile, are a faction of ravenous bugs determined to consume everything. They have no concept of diplomacy, and are eternally at war with all the other factions.

As the stage for all this drama and conflict, Auriga was perfect—secretive, surprising and always in flux. But with Saiadha, Amplitude's taking this even further. It's an oceanic world, and with the prevalence of water you might assume that one of the big threats facing the factions would be flooding, but the opposite is true.

"So there's one thing that we know for sure, and we already were aware of this in Endless Legend 1, and it's that players hate when you destroy things," says de Waubert de Genlis. If it's an AI faction storming your city, that's different, but it's less compelling when the game just tells you that a flood has destroyed everything you've built. "No, it's not fun. It's frustrating. So the way we look at it is we want the planet to feel alive, and something is happening that will indeed change the gameplay."

With changing seasons and the dramatic tidefalls, Saiadha is an evolving world. The vast oceans will recede, says de Waubert de Genlis. "The sea bed actually becomes new regions, and they're fertile, and they have dangers, but they also have rewards, and it's happening at the same time for everyone. It's like this sudden rush for new lands, where everyone will know that it's happening."

He likens this rush to a battle royale, but one where the map gets larger rather than smaller. All the factions are racing to exploit the new regions before the others can arrive, and if they get there at the same time, they'll need to duke it out. This way, Amplitude is trying to maintain arguably the best 4X phase, where you're exploring the world and seeing a constant stream of new things.

Trailblazer

"It is very fulfilling," he says. "For me, in 4Xs, exploration is one of the elements I love the most. But most of the time, it is over once you've scouted the whole planet, right? So that pleasure disappears." What Amplitude wants is for this to be "a feeling that will stick to you until the end". Tension and surprises and rewards that the game keeps on spitting out whether you're just starting out or are 15 hours into your campaign.

The way Endless Legend treats its setting makes it rare among 4Xs, where the maps are mostly battlefields or resource generators. "The way we want to look at our planets in our games is, in a way, the planet is the hero of the game, because it's the only one that we're playing on each time," says Waubert de Genlis. "We want to put it at the centre of the storytelling. Sometimes we want to make it feel like it's alive, that has a story behind it. It can react somehow. I think it is a very interesting way of putting it, to create a bond between not just you and the factions, but you, the factions, and the planet itself, and to make it feel like it is all intertwined."

He's preaching to the choir: it's an approach I've loved since Alpha Centauri, and it's a shame that most 4Xs eschew this powerful sense of place. It works so well with Amplitude's 4Xs, too, because storytelling is already such an important pillar in them—you can see the narrative tendrils everywhere. Like its predecessor, While Endless Legend 2 won't have a traditional campaign, each faction has their own bespoke storyline with quests and characters and specific challenges with different branches, effectively giving the game a whole bunch of campaigns—which you can choose to engage with or ignore.

One of the things I particularly dug about Endless Legend was the extra effort it made in catering to less aggressive playstyles, with certain factions leaning more into mercantilism, diplomacy and espionage. And when it came to battles, Amplitude wanted you to feel like the ruler of a people rather than a military commander. As de Waubert de Genlis puts it, "It's not all about a war. It's all about building an empire and being an emperor, not a general, not a captain." He wanted battles to last a couple of minutes rather than half an hour. You could still command your troops, and then watch the turn play out, but the brawls were all pretty simple and brisk. That's all I wanted. But it proved to be divisive.

"Some people love it," he says, "but some people really didn't love it at all." Players were "frustrated" because they didn't have enough control over the battles, and the same went for Endless Space 2, where you picked cards for different phases of a battle to determine the actions of your fleet. Again, I was really into this, but it split the community.

For Endless Legend 2, then, Amplitude is taking some lessons from Humankind, which had more traditional turn-based fights—at least in the sense that you command your units one by one—though still in instanced battlefields. In hindsight, de Waubert de Genlis wishes he would have used this combat model for the first Endless Legend, but now he can rectify that.

He's also glad to have an opportunity to improve the AI. "When you work on a 4X, AI is a nightmare because you work on the rules of the game until the last minute, and the AI is always lagging." The AI programmers are always having to play catch-up, with gameplay tweaks occurring right up until the last moment. One of the ways Amplitude is improving the AI is by creating tools to better help it to understand why the AI is doing something. "Sometimes it was impossible to tell if it was really smart or really stupid." We won't see these tools—it's all under the hood—but we should hopefully see the impact.

Reassuringly, one thing de Waubert de Genlis doesn't want to change is Amplitude's philosophy of asymmetry, even when it means factions might be unbalanced. The differences between the factions don't come down to statistical bonuses—they are far more exotic than that. And leaning too much into perfect balance would risk removing some of the fun, the potential for experimentation and the novelty inherent in each empire. He doesn't want to launch the game with a bunch of broken factions, naturally, but if players find "a crazy way to win the game with a faction no one else has found," then that's a good thing. It's part of the game: "How can I exploit all these weird quirks of the faction to win?"

Early access also gives Amplitude the opportunity to tweak the factions along with the community, and the studio has a long history of this. It's been doing early access since before early access existed, as well as running player initiatives to get feedback and bring in testers. So along with early access, there's the Amplitude Insiders Program, through which the studio will invite players to test the game before it launches on Steam. You can apply to join it now.

Amplitude hasn't revealed exactly when Endless Legend 2 will launch in early access, but it's coming in 2025. After a decade, I guess I can wait just a wee bit longer to conquer Saiadha as a bunch of tragic Dust vampires, or whatever new weirdos the team flings into the mix.

Far from resting on its laurels, Firaxis is really mixing things up with Civ 7, introducing a new three-act structure that sees us pick new civs as we transition between ages—you might've seen a similar system in another recent grand strategy game, Humankind. That and other changes will be controversial among fans of the series, but whether they turn out to be for the better or worse, I'm glad Sid Meier's gang of history nerds is still trying new things. (An argument also made by PC Gamer contributor Len Hafer recently.)

Here are all the important details about Civilization 7's launch and new features.

Release date

When is the Civilization 7 release date?

The Civilization 7 release date is February 11, and it's releasing simultaneously on Windows, Mac, Linux, and consoles with crossplay for multiplayer. The PC versions of Civ 7 are available on Steam and the Epic Games Store, and it will be Steam Deck compatible.

If you pre-purchase the Deluxe or Founders editions, you can start playing early on February 6.

What's the critical response so far?

In our Civilization 7 review (76%), Robert Zak praised its new environment art and said that it retains the series' knack for making evenings turn into mornings. However, the slimming and streamlining went too far for his tastes. For now at least (Civ games always get lots of updates and expansions), Civilization 5 and 6 players may find that they still prefer those games.

Reviews from other outlets include a mix of 10-out-of-10s, less enthusiastic praise (IGN gave it a 7), and a few negative reviews, most notably Eurogamer's 2/5 stars.

What's Civilization 7's new "ages" system all about?

This is the really big change. A game of Civilization 7 is divided into three ages: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. You'll pick a new civilization in each age, so while you might start as Egypt in Antiquity, you can end up ruling Spain during the Exploration Age, and then perhaps the French Empire in the Modern Age. You keep the same leader throughout, and leaders are thus no longer locked to the civ that best represents their historical context.

Before an age ends, all players experience a Crisis Event, which requires them to choose Crisis Policies—negative effects that make everything a little harder for the last handful of turns in an age. The good news is that, when the age ends and the next one begins, there's a soft reset: wars end, you can move your capital, city states are refreshed, and more.

Firaxis hopes that this added structure will help more players complete full Civilization campaigns—it noticed that not many Civ 6 players see the end of the game—and I expect it to be the most controversial change. The developer has described the system in more detail in this blog post.

What Civ 7 leaders and civs have been confirmed?

Perhaps because leaders are no longer glued to the civilizations they hail from, Firaxis has gotten a little more playful with its selections for Civ 7, increasing the proportion of historical figures who weren't rulers or heads of state, such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Harriet Tubman. Another big consequence of the ages system is that civs are now tied to the age in which they appear, so Egypt can only be played in the Antiquity Age, for instance.

Complete lists of the leaders and civilizations that have been announced so far are available on the official Civilization 7 website: list of leaders, list of civs.

What other notable changes does Civilization 7 make?

After I visited Firaxis last year and saw Civilization 7 for the first time, I wrote down all the big changes I noticed. I won't reproduce that entire list here—there are a lot of changes, and I haven't even seen everything—but here are some of the most important ones, excluding the ages system discussed above:

• Settlers now found towns rather than cities. Towns have no production queue, instead converting their productive capacity into gold. They can be converted into cities with gold, or can be kept as towns and given specializations. At the end of an age, cities other than your capital revert to towns.
• Workers are gone. Instead, whenever a settlement's borders expand (settlement being the term used to refer to cities and towns collectively), you're prompted to pick a new tile. Improvements like mines are automatically constructed on the tiles you select, and if they're damaged they can be repaired in the settlement management screen.
• Settlements are divided into rural and urban tiles. The district system from Civ 6 has been simplified. Rural tiles have improvements like mines and plantations, while urban tiles can house two buildings.
• Regular units no longer get promotions. Instead, you now have military commanders who buff nearby units, can be used as personnel carriers, and can get new abilities through promotions.
• There's a new currency called Influence which can be used for diplomacy, espionage, and sabotage.
• There are navigable rivers. Finally!

For more, Firaxis has gone pretty deep on some of Civ 7's systems in its streams and dev diaries.

Shit is indeed about to get real, but separate from all that Valve has kicked off the first Steam sale of 2025 in the form of the Real-Time Strategy Fest, a week-long extravaganza of deals, demos, and free stuff in the Steam Points Shop, all of it geared at—you guessed it—real-time strategy games.

It's not all RTS games, to be clear. If grand strategy is your thing, Europa Universalis 4 is 90% off ($5/£4/€5) and Victoria 3 is half price ($25/£21/€25). If you enjoy misery and don't especially care for children, Frostpunk 2 is down to $35/£30/€35—that's 22% off the regular price—or you can do some medieval city building with Manor Lords, 30% for the duration of the RTS Fest ($28/£24.49/€28). There's 4X games (Stellaris at 75% off is a good choice), tower defense, at least one typing game—if there's some kind of strategy connection, then it's probably in this sale.

Naturally, there's plenty see in the way of conventional RTS games too:

• Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 Anniversary Edition - $10/£8/€p (80% off)
• Iron Harvest - $4.49/£4/€4.49 (85% off)
• Age of Empires 4 Anniversary Edition - $20/£15/€20 – (50% off)
• Homeworld Remastered Collection - $3.49/£2.69/€3.19 (90% off)
• Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak - $5/£3/€4.59 (also 90% off, might as well get 'em all)
• Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 - $4/£3.59/€4 (80% off)
• Company of Heroes 3 - $30/£24/€27.49 (50% off)

If you want to get in on the big sale action but aren't sure where to start, take a dive into our list of the best strategy games on PC. And if all you're really after is some free stuff, head over to the Steam Points Shop and claim a couple avatar frames and a nice "RTS Tank" animated avatar.

Steam's Real-Time Strategy Fest is live now and runs until 10 am PT/1 pm ET on January 27.

Bungie's fantasy tactics game was best known for the chaos created by its bomb-throwing dwarves, and I distinctly recall being mesmerised by how their ordnance would scatter undead body parts across the game's undulating pastoral landscapes.

The Myth series has long been eclipsed by Halo's stratospheric success, but the Dallas-based Stray Kite Studios remembers it well enough. The developer's newly announced game Wartorn channels the frantic decision-making and kinetic combat of Myth and its sequel, and as one of the three other people who remember Bungie's fantasy series, I am very excited indeed.

Wartorn sees players assuming control of two elven sisters travelling across a conflict-ravaged landscape on a personal quest to find their family. That's according to Stray Kite's press release, which also explains that along the way, they'll have to "confront moral dilemmas and battle external and internal threats". Given there's only two of them, I'm not sure how internal threats will work exactly, unless the sisters have a big falling out, or catch a stomach bug from drinking improperly purified water.

The trailer released alongside the announcement doesn't provide much insight into Wartorn's narrative side, but it reveals plenty about the combat. The bits that struck me as particularly Myth were the arrow-barrage ability around 30 seconds in and the moment an ogre slams its club into the ground just before the minute mark, triggering a shockwave that scatters several unfortunate gobbos across a field like hayseed.

Yet there's plenty here that diverges from Bungie's template, too, such as a strong emphasis on elemental abilities, like fireballs and a nifty-looking tidal-wave spell that bowls over a group of fiery demons halfway through the trailer. These elements will apparently interact with each other in familiar ways (water quenches fire, lightning electrifies water, etc) while also wreaking havoc within what Stray Kite claims are highly destructible environments.

As someone who loves messing with the elements to make things explode (I must have been an alchemist in a past life), Wartorn's trailer whispers all the right words in my ear. It also has some notable talent behind it. The project is led by Paul Hellquist, whose credits include lead designer on SWAT 4 and BioShock at Irrational, and later game design director of the original Borderlands. Meanwhile, Stray Kite's cofounder Shovaen Patel worked on the Orcs Must Die series before establishing the studio, which is likewise evident in Wartorn's DNA.

In an interview with YouTuber CohhCarnage, Hellquist discussed Wartorn's connection to the Myth series. "We were putting up different ideas of the kinds of games we wanted to make. And I brought up, 'Hey, have any of you guys ever played this game Myth. And Shovaen immediately was like, oh, yeah, I loved Myth back in the day,'" Hellquist says. "That's what got the ball rolling and us thinking about 'Man, it'd be really cool to kind of revive some of the things that were in that product, but modernize it.'"

No specific release date has been announced for Wartorn yet, but Stray Kite says Wartorn will launch later this year into Steam early access. If you want to know more about the games that inspired Wartorn, Myth and its sequel aren't available to buy anywhere, sadly, but they're also not too difficult to find if you know where to look.

There's a dramatic end-of-days quality to the conflict that ensues. This is the end of the Age of Antiquity. The march of progress through this era, which is amassed collectively by the cultural, economic, military, and scientific achievements of all civilisations in the game, is almost at an end; the building of glorious wonders and other milestones of progress has been replaced by a continental plague—one of several 'Crisis' scenarios that automatically ensue towards the end of an era—and a war that's somehow pulled in every civilisation and city-state on the land (clearly, I wasn't the only one who had enough of Charlemagne's Byzantine bullshit).

The apocalyptic feel is enhanced by the fact that I have no real idea of how the world will look after the transition from Antiquity to the Age of Exploration. The game's been warning me to brace myself, but even that couldn't prepare me for what may well be the most radical, disruptive mechanic in the history of the series.

My Mayan armies tear through the Roman Empire, led by Commanders that offer new tactical twists to the game's combat. Building on the Great General units of previous games, Commanders grant buffs to surrounding units, but also act as carriers, letting you bundle several units onto them and traverse the map on a single tile. Then, when you're ready for battle, you de-stack your armies around the commander, who can bark unique orders such as 'Focus Fire' to strengthen your attacks. Individual units no longer gain XP in battle. Instead, all combat XP goes to the nearby commander, and is spent in skill trees that let you bolster their effectiveness not only in combat but in peacetime (such as by having them improve yields when they're stationed in a city).

Before long, Charlemagne's capital is in my sights. With the Age of Antiquity 98% complete, I'm determined for the sacking of Rome to bookmark this era (even if I'm a little disappointed at the meagre resistance, making me wonder whether Firaxis have resolved the previous game's notorious AI issues). My horsemen pillage through the city's outskirts and wipe out the weirdly unprotected Roman commanders, my ballistas rain hell on the city centre, and finally my humble Jaguar Slayers stroll into the virtually defenceless capital.

With that, the Age of Antiquity comes to an end.

A brave new age

This is where, for anyone familiar with the usual flow of a Civ game at least, things get a little crazy. With one turn left to prep myself for the next age, I attach my finest units to commanders, understanding that they would carry over to the new age this way (as it transpired, all my military units got deleted anyway, which is odd as the Civopedia really suggested otherwise, so I've contacted Firaxis to figure out what happened here).

When the age transition finally comes, it's like one game ends then another begins. The triumphant theme music kicks in, and you get to pore over the legacy points you've accrued as well as the end-of-age rankings. Next, you pick a new civilisation to lead into the next era. As much of my Mayan civ was based around rivers, I met the criteria to unlock the Songhai for the Exploration era, who offer bonuses for river tiles as well as various tradey-economical boons.

I definitely felt a pang of longing for my Mayan civ with which I'd achieved so much, but its triumphs and accomplishments live on into the new era. Your territory remains intact, your commanders survive and retain their promotions, and the spirit of your previous civ lives on through unique districts, Wonders, and traditions that you can use as social policies. Then there are Legacy Points, which you earn by hitting various milestones along the four legacy paths: Economic, Cultural, Science, and Military. In my case, I went all in on science in antiquity, which unlocked high-end scientific legacy options such as Golden Age Libraries and the option to convert all my accrued Antiquity-era Great Works—which disappear with the era transition—into Science currency.

But a lot also changes in the thousand or so years that the game skips in the age transition. Those city-states you buddied up with are gone, replaced by new ones placed elsewhere on the map. Your antiquity-era units, apart from your commander, are wiped out and replaced by a baseline army of six new-Age units spread throughout your empire, and your social policies, antiquity-era building adjacency bonuses, and codices are all gone. Perhaps the most drastic change is that all your cities outside of your capital revert to towns, which basically reduces them to resource-feeders—albeit very efficient ones, from experience—for your empire until you convert them to cities using gold.

Times are a'changin'

The centuries that passed in that age transition were closely reflected in the time I spent poring over my legacy and civ choices for the new age. Once I confirmed everything, I emerged onto a whole new world, with adobe buildings and minarets replacing the wooden huts of the previous age, while my trusty loin-clothed Jaguar Slayers were replaced by armour-clad coursers and Gold Bangles Infantry (a Songhai unique unit). The soundtrack, as brilliant and catchy as ever, also shifted tenor from chanty Mayan and Buddhist beats to more of a medieval Middle Eastern flavour.

With many of the previous era's perks gone, the gap between the top and bottom-ranked civ shrinks a fair bit (though not so much as to render your achievements up to that point meaningless), and the new opportunities and systems presented by the new era open up new paths for straggling civs to stage a comeback. Lands left behind by extinct city-states reignite that exciting early-game landgrabbing feel, while new seafaring techs let everyone set sail for new lands somewhat synchronously, rather than centuries apart. Organised religion comes into play too, replacing the rudimentary pantheons of antiquity.

Whether you're winning or losing, the new era allows for a bit of a focus reset. With my strong science legacy giving me a massive headstart on that front going into the new era, I decided to turn my focus to religion, which basically dominates the cultural legacy path in the Exploration Age (and in a game where the historical etch-a-sketch is even more etchy-sketchy now that leaders and civs can be freely mix-and-matched, I found it quietly comforting that as Confucius, I founded the Confucian religion—finally, some semblance of order in this mad world!).

I'm still acclimatising to the impact of the Ages system, because the impact on the game is huge, though my early feelings on it are positive. While I can't see the hapless AI on default difficulty catching up to me in this campaign, in multiplayer this kind of rubberbanding can address the age-old Civ problem of those who get off to a bad start finding themselves in an unwinnable situation well before the halfway point of the game.

Meanwhile, as someone who's winning my game, I feel like enough of my achievements from the previous era carry over into the current one for me to feel rewarded. My Wonders still stand, my scientific legacy from antiquity will echo through the centuries, and my empire remains intact, albeit in need of a refresh with new buildings, units, and so on. Confining the rollout of new techs and systems to specific ages lets everyone tackle them from the same starting point—even if some of you come to that starting point better equipped than others—while the wipeout and refresh of units keeps turns from becoming too stodgy.

Even in the midst of my Civ 7 review, I can say that the question of whether this is the best iteration yet will probably be redundant until all the expansions roll out and we see the full vision enacted. What I can say is that its biggest, boldest shake-up to the series formula gave me a frisson of excitement at a point in the game where things might have started stagnating in previous iterations. That, already, is a major milestone passed on Civ 7's legacy path.

Aussie outfit PlaySide's survival RTS is leaving early access after four years today, and it's going to be disastrous for my health. Since it's been a while since it first appeared on Steam, let me get you up to speed: Age of Darkness is an RTS in the vein of zombie romp They Are Billions, where your task is to survive tidal waves of monsters determined to annihilate your vulnerable settlement.

It is incredibly stressful, but it has a brisk rhythm that simply won't let you quit. Each brief day will see you shoring up your defenses and generating the resources required to survive, and the moment the sun goes down, the monsters come out to play. When the sun's out, they are largely passive, at least until you send your units to scour the environment for resource caches, but the darkness emboldens them, making them stronger and more aggressive.

Most nights, though, they are easy to handle. Small groups of them will prod your defenses, trying to slip through them to attack your keep (when it goes down you're done) and while you might lose a building here or there, at least until you surround yourself with walls, regular nights probably won't result in your demise. It's the Death Nights that you really have to worry about.

After surviving for a few nights, a vast horde of Nightmares will be summoned, and they'll rush towards your settlement, slamming up against the walls in a desperate attempt to eradicate your keep. Your settlement will also be surrounded by a thick, lethal fog, harming and terrifying any units that run into it. It even gets into your base itself, lingering in the places where there's no light.

Sweet dreams

Survive a Death Night and you'll be given a reprieve, but there's always another one coming. Each victory gives you more breathing room, but it's not a relief; the next Death Night is going to be much worse, with the horde growing dramatically each time. From hundreds to thousands. Age of Darkness's SwarmTech magic allows for more than 70,000 AI-controlled units on the screen at any time. It's making me sweat just thinking about it.

It's a simple but brutal structure that I've still not quite figured out yet. There's a surprising amount to juggle, exacerbated by the shortness of the days. You've got just enough time to make meaningful improvements to your base and expand your army, but not enough time to make many mistakes. After years in early access I'm sure there's a 'perfect' build order, but I won't be able to enjoy the victory unless I figure it out for myself.

How many farms should I have by Death Night 1? How many archers should I have by Death Night 2? When's the best time to start upgrading fortifications? Should I risk sending my army out tonight to kill an elite Nightmare, netting myself potent rewards, like the ability to resurrect my hero without waiting for the cooldown? Or should I wait until I have a bigger army?

Every building and unit has resource prerequisites, from people to stone, and in some cases how many resources you generate per tick is determined by the placement of the buildings, as well as how many people are diligently working away inside them. There are a lot of numbers to consider, and the trick is learning the precise formula that will ensure victory. I just don't know what it is yet.

Precision is the magic word here, but then you've got Malices and Blessings, which throw a spanner in the works. Malices are random negative effects that appear at the start of each Death Night, and include things like your own units rising from the dead to attack you, or Nightmares spawning from destroyed buildings. Blessings, meanwhile, are random rewards you earn by surviving Death Nights, which can buff your heroes and units or give your buildings positive quirks.

If you're finding the survival mode too easy, even on the higher difficulties, you can also pick some Hardships—difficulty modifiers that introduce unpleasant twists, like never getting Blessings or losing the ability to sell buildings. I'm definitely not at the point where I'll be needing these to give me a challenge. The regular difficulty is still kicking my arse.

A wall of flesh

I've played quite a bit of They Are Billions and Diplomacy is Not an Option, and I've started dabbling in Cataclismo, but while Age of Darkness has a similar conceit, there have been some surprises. Namely, that towers and fortifications don't feel that effective—at least not compared to your army. Cataclismo and Diplomacy is Not an Option are particularly focused on big construction projects, where you'll create huge, elaborate fortifications to halt the tide of doom. But thus far, my defenses in Age of Darkness have only served to give me enough time to get my army in place, and maybe recruit a few more warriors, before they're torn down by the relentless horde.

Even my basic warriors, though, are able to carve a bloody swathe through the sea of Nightmares. Heroes, meanwhile, are like one-person armies, and their unique abilities can take out big groups in one hit, or buff their allies, making their use essential. Add upgrades into the mix and it becomes clear that it's better to invest in flesh than complicated fortifications. And to be clear, this ain't a bad thing. Other games already tap into the fantasy of building stalwart castles. Age of Darkness offers something different.

Between all the modifiers, the three factions and the different difficulties, though, I imagine players will find all sorts of strategies that work for them. And I'm certainly not saying ignore your towers and walls. That way lies death. And a big army doesn't guarantee success.

I would have probably still been up at 5 am this morning if I hadn't grown too confident about the effectiveness of my warriors. See, the Nightmares ended up hitting a spot in my defences which I'd kinda been ignoring. It was only a small gap, where I'd placed one gate and two towers, with only one archer in each. I thought the horde was heading towards a different, better-defended wall. By the time my troops arrived, the gate was down and the towers were seconds away from joining them. Only a handful of Nightmares had been taken out, leaving around 1900 left.

I was a second too slow, unable to put my army in the gap to stop the Nightmares from swarming. With all this space to spread, they surrounded my forces, and while I managed to take out hundreds of them, it wasn't enough. Being attacked from all sides, each unit was going down in a second, and before I knew it I was left with nothing. My keep didn't stand a chance.

Despite feeling a bit sore about my loss, I was so close to talking myself into another run. I had a new plan. I definitely wouldn't make that mistake again (I did end up playing again just before I published this and while it went better, I still got demolished on the same day. Back to the drawing board!). Just one more go. But the risk of falling asleep during the morning meeting made me reconsider. I went to bed, reluctantly.

Bedtime story

The survival mode is where I've spent most of my time, but Age of Darkness also includes a campaign. Technically you should start there, as it slowly introduces important mechanics and gives you a solid basis for developing your survival strategies before you're flung into the deep end. Despite this, I'd actually recommend just diving head first into survival.

See, the campaign is just incredibly ponderous, and you won't even encounter your first horde until you've put quite a bit of time into it. Initially, there's just a lot of running around, completing dull quests and killing bandits with a small group of heroes and soldiers. It's an awful introduction, and I only started to enjoy myself once I quit and hopped into a survival game—which, as of launch, you'll be able to enjoy with a pal thanks to the introduction of online co-op.

While I like a good yarn, I don't really care about the story of this bleak world. I just wanna fight absurdly large swarms of monsters and come up with a winning strategy. Hell, I might start doing some maths. Consider this the biggest compliment I can give Age of Darkness: it's getting me excited about homework. But first, a lunchtime nap! And then it's back to the slaughter, probably until dawn. I'm having too much fun to be responsible.

This hasn't come without controversy. The question looms: how much can you change Civilization before it's no longer a main series Civilization game? If you're asking me, though, the answer is quite a bit more. This series has been around since before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and has inspired waves of historical strategy games that have gone on to inspire waves of their own. It's a grandparent at this point. I wouldn't even mind if they went further into the weeds than Civ 7 already is.

A big part of why it doesn't bother me is the fact that the older Civs remain so accessible and so playable to this day. Different parts of them have held up better than others, but I think you could sit down as a total newcomer to the series today and play Civ 4, Civ 5, or Civ 6 and have a really good experience. Those games aren't going anywhere. I have friends who still mostly play Civ 4, and see the era of one military unit per tile as high heresy. Civ 5 has remained my favorite all the way through the long post-launch life cycle of Civ 6. I fired it up again just over this last winter break.

So the most offensive thing Firaxis could possibly do, in my opinion, is give us essentially the same game again with better graphics. Civ 6 was never different enough to fully pull me away from Civ 5. I need something with a really strong pitch for why I'd switch over. Why would I play the launch version of Civ 7 over any of the other three relatively modern Civ games that already benefit from tons of expansions, patches, and a rich modding community? I don't want Civ to turn into something like Call of Duty or Madden where new entries often feel more like going through the motions than anything. And dang it, Civ 7 seems to want to give me a compelling answer to that question.

Prior to this entry, every main series Civ game had a different game director. Civ 7 is being helmed by Civ 6's Ed Beach, which initially rubbed me the wrong way. "But it's tradition!" I'd shout. "We need a fresh perspective!" But what I think this opportunity has turned into is, for the first time ever, seeing someone who finished an entire Civilization game getting to take a step back and think about what they would have done differently. And it seems like maybe that led to a more daring direction than the series would have gone otherwise. Beach already got his version of a "safe" Civ game out of his system with Civ 6. So now, why not swing for the fences? Get a little weird with it?

Civ-likes, as a specific subset of 4X, have become a bit of a crowded club over the last few years, too. We got Humankind from Amplitude, Millennia from C Prompt, Ara: History Untold from Oxide, and the somewhat divergent Old World from Mohawk. But for me, none of them have really come all that close to challenging Civ for the crown. The one that comes closest, Old World, is also the one that's the most different from the Civ formula, and I don't think that's a coincidence.

So to see Firaxis look at some of these competitors and incorporate bits of their innovative ideas here and there is also exciting, because frankly, I trust them to do it better. There is some kind of noticeable difference in craft at work here. There is a secret sauce. It's why I keep going back to Civ 5 and Civ 6 over and over and I've barely touched Humankind or Ara since launch (and might never touch Millennia again), other than maybe when I hear that they dropped some kind of huge patch. I'm glad that competition exists, because I think it's pushing Firaxis to reexamine their own design ideas.

I know there is probably a subset of players, maybe the type who don't really play games other than Civ, who would be happy to get a fairly safe sequel every five to ten years, and who would put hundreds more hours into roughly the same game with better graphics. But that's not the path I want to see Civilization take, choked by inertia and bogged down in decadence like a once-great empire fading into obscurity. I want to see a Civ that is bold, innovative, and recognizes that times change. Something new gets built on the ruins of what came before. I'm hoping Civilization 7 will truly be that game.

This patch will mean players can now attempt endgame bosses more than once, and will ensure there are less deadly explosions that seemingly kill you out of nowhere. All of those things will be welcomed by players, but the biggest complaint remains the fact that you get one chance at endgame maps.

This element of Path of Exile 2 is unforgiving: Die and you're booted out of the map, losing XP and any loot drops you haven't yet grabbed. And while you can restart the map on the Atlas, you'll need a new waystone to enter it, and you'll lose any modifiers that it originally contained. In some ways that makes sense for a game of this nature, a genuinely high stakes looting challenge where it can all go wrong in an instant. But some just don't like sinking hours of time into something and losing it all like that.

"We did discuss quite a lot about whether we wanted to go back on one portal or not," says Rogers during an interview with streamers Darth Microtransaction and GhazzyTV discussing the patch. "I think it comes down to the fact that it would just not feel the same. The whole 'death actually mattering' thing is actually important.

"We were talking about the pinnacle boss and the discussion came up 'should we allow portals everywhere, should we be allowing checkpoints everywhere' and we ultimately decided we really don't want to go that way if possible. So first of all we try out this pinnacle stuff, make sure it's something where you have true economic value you have to preserve: It takes time to get there and that matters."

Rogers says that for the game to work "you have to have some level of failure being possible" and if players were allowed multiple opportunities you simply don't "fail in the same way… I'm not really a fan, I much prefer the whole 'one death' thing."

As for the XP penalty and whether that's too harsh, "part of the thinking around that is that it's keeping you in the place where you're supposed to be, as in if you're dying all the time then you're probably not ready to keep going up the power curve," says Rogers. "But maybe that's the wrong way of looking at it."

With all that said, GGG's Mark Roberts acknowledges that the endgame right now is not quite hitting that sweet spot of risk and reward the studio wants. “Right now there are too many penalty axes," says Roberts (thanks, Polygon), "so if you're dying all the time, you're not gonna get materials, and thus you're not going to go anywhere… and also an 'add insult to injury' thing [with the XP] where you're just not levelling.

"I think they’re just a bit too severe when all combined together, and I also think that the very start of maps is just too difficult, I think we should ease into that a little bit, bring that down a bit then ramp the difficulty up." Roberts says the rare monsters and the unusual combinations mean players are constantly having to adjust their tactics and the number of different combinations mean "there's nothing to really take from one map to another."

The devs say they're going to be watching how the new patch plays out and focus any bigger changes on the game's next league (season), which will come with more substantial changes. But it sounds like the "one death" principle is here to stay.

"It would be nice if you could just spin another map and still be able to do that content," says Rogers. "But unfortunately we can't do that because it would open up too many economic abuse things, where like you fail the map intentionally because you want to farm the items in the rest of the area. So it's very difficult for us to come up with a solution because I really would prefer that, honestly, if you could re-do a map without having all the problems that being able to re-run a map would actually cause."

"I personally want to keep the one portal and adjust the other axes and see how it plays out," ends Roberts, "before compromising on the one portal. But yeah, it's a bit tricky, it certainly is the case we've discussed it so many times before [PoE2] came out we knew 'people are definitely gonna complain about this' and we know and we haven't found a solution."

Look on the Steam forum for XCOM 2 and you'll see threads noting that some mods no longer work, and having them installed can result in consistent crashing. Similar complaints have appeared on Reddit. Using the Alternative Mod Launcher, a community project that helped players get around the 2K launcher, doesn't help either.

Testing it myself, I found that XCOM 2 would only launch with certain mods enabled, and fail no matter which launcher I tried—both the old and new options provided by Steam and the Alternative Mod Launcher. The unifying factor seemed to be that mods with the War of the Chosen expansion as a hard requirement worked, while those without it did not. Mods like the Armory Camera Tweak, which prevents oversized characters from blocking the UI, were fine, while mods like the Imperial Guard Voice Pack, which lets you give your squaddies voice lines ripped from Dawn of War, did not.

I did find a fix for this, however. Go into the directory where Steam keeps your XCOM 2 mods, which should be Steam\steamapps\workshop\content\268500, and then open the subdirectory for any mods you've got installed. Each one will have a file that ends in ".XComMod" which can be opened with Notepad. If it doesn't have the line "RequiresXPACK=true" in there, add it at the end, then save. Do that for every mod you've downloaded, enable them in your mod launcher, and they should work. I've tried it with 40 different mods so far, from one that refreshes the reward deck when you enter the Avenger, to one that lets you outfit your soldiers in Sisters of Battle armor, and they seem to be working fine.

Civilizations 5 and 6 are both playable, but with caveats on Steam Deck: The primary hang-ups for both seem to be text legibility on the Deck's small screen, and the need to manually invoke the Deck's keyboard for certain functions. Neither of those is usually a dealbreaker for me when considering games for Steam Deck, though Civ is such a wordy series, I could see eye strain from small text being more of an issue than usual. Like both of those games, the system's raw graphical grunt is not at all a problem with Civ 7⁠—it has some very breezy and lightweight system requirements:

Minimum

• OS: Win 10 64 Bit
• Processor: Intel i5-4690 / Intel i3-10100 / AMD Ryzen 3 1200
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1050 / AMD RX 460 / Intel Arc A380
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 20 GB available space

Recommended

• OS: Win 10 64 Bit
• Processor: Intel Core i5-10400 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: NVIDIA RTX 2060 / AMD RX 6600 / Intel Arc A750
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 20 GB available space

I can't imagine it took too much development effort to make sure Civ 7 plays nice with the Steam Deck, and it strikes me as a no-brainer move too. Civilization 6 was successfully ported to the Nintendo Switch after all, and the series' relaxed pace of play should make the transition from mouse and keyboard to a pad more comfortable than with other PC-first games. Between taking Civ 7 handheld at launch and the structural changes Firaxis has promised for the game, it should be easier than ever to actually finish a game of Civilization with this one. For more on Civilization 7, you can read about why it's our most-wanted upcoming game of 2025.

Emrich was a notable figure in the world of boardgaming: His bio at BoardGameGeek says he was the founder of boardgame publisher Victory Point Games as well as multiple tabletop gaming conventions.

He was also a significant presence in the early days of videogaming, working on games including Castles 2: Siege and Conquest, Warlords 2, Conquest of the New World, and Master of Orion 3. His most recent credit listed on MobyGames is as a design consultant on the 2016 Master of Orion remake.

As well as making games, Emrich also wrote about them, which is where I came to know his work: He served as a longtime editor on Computer Gaming World, the preeminent gaming magazine of the 1980s and '90s, including as its first-ever "On-Line Editor." It was in those pages that he made what I would consider his most enduring contribution to the form, although it's unlikely anyone realized it at the time: Creating the term "4X," which continues to be used today to describe the subgenre of strategy games in which economic development and expansion is as important as military conquest.

While he didn't use the term directly, he very clearly laid its foundation in his September 1993 review of Master of Orion (via CGW Museum), calling it a "quadruple-X" game, a play on the unofficial triple-X rating applied to porn flicks.

"I give MOO a XXXX rating because it features the essential four Xs of any good strategic conquest game: EXplore, EXpand, EXploit, and EXterminate. In other words, players must rise from humble beginnings, finding their way around the map while building up the largest, most efficient empire possible. Naturally, the other players will be trying to do the same, therefore their extermination becomes a paramount concern. A classic situation, indeed, and when the various parts are properly designed, other Xs seem to follow. Words like EXcite, EXperiment, and EXcuses (to one's significant others) must be added to a gamer's X-Rating list."

"A longtime giant of the gaming world, both tabletop and digital, Alan founded VPG, taught game design in college before it was cool, and coined the term '4X' for those games we all love," wargaming community Armchair Dragoons wrote in a tribute to Emrich shared on Bluesky. "He's the guy responsible for Master of Orion, made print-on-demand wargame publication a viable business model, never met a monster game he didn't want to like. Alan's influence will be rippling through the hobby gaming world for many years to come, and he is gone too soon.

"There's a significant hole in the wargaming world tonight. Everyone raise an extra glass tonight in honor of a man happy to sling dice with any opponent, so long there was a good conversation during the game."

A cause of death has not been released.

"I teach undergraduates in my other life, and my God, man, they don't read," Johnson told me on a call in November. "And trying to get them interested in history—if somebody plays Machiavelli, they might get really kind of interested. Machiavelli maybe has enough name recognition already, but like Amina [Queen of Zazzau], or, 'OK, so this is the Ming Dynasty, how is that different from the Han Dynasty?' If that can provoke somebody into an interest in history, that is what's important here. This is not the textbook. This is the gateway drug into the textbook. If textbooks were drugs."

For Civilization 7, Firaxis has loosened up its criteria for leaders, hence why Machiavelli can rule ancient China, although it's hard to say this is some new turn away from historicity given that the series has always been about rewriting the past, often with silly consequences. For Johnson, the problems that arise when trying to represent history in a grand strategy game are more academic.

For example, borders in Southeast Asia have a different character than borders in other parts of the world, says Johnson: "There's overlapping zones of sovereignty. Somebody can be both a part of the Cambodian state and part of the Thai state, part of the Laotian state, pay tribute to all, or none. But that doesn't work in a game where you need direct lines on the map. So that's fine. We can nod to that somewhere in the Civilopedia or the gameplay, and maybe if somebody gets interested enough in the Khmer Empire, they can go read about it."

To me, Firaxis' biggest historical problems come from the fact that Civ is a game you can win, meaning it presents history as something that can be won. Given that Civ 7's new three-act structure includes an "Exploration Age" which encourages players to construct navies and set off for distant lands—perhaps to conquer and colonize them, perhaps not— asked Johnson if he worried the game projected a Eurocentric view. Are the colonial empires the model for 'winning' here?

With his apologies to Civ 7 narrative designer Dr. Rue Taylor, an expert in medieval Europe, Johnson said that he specifically wants to counter the tendency to overemphasize European history.

"When the ordinary history buff picks up a game, they're oftentimes saturated in European, sometimes in East Asian history, and don't really look beyond that," said Johnson. "So ideas about a passive, traditional, mystical 'other' and a dynamic active Europe is one of the things that I really felt like pushing back on. And so civilizations like Chola are, to me, really interesting, because here you have large, polyreligious, multi-ethnic trade routes extending across the Indian Ocean at the time Beowulf is being written, and Europeans are looking under rocks for trolls. So I think getting the dynamism of the world outside of Europe is really what I find fascinating here.

"For me, the Exploration Age is about that age of interconnection. Yes, you have the high age of European colonization in there. But you've also got the Indian Ocean trade. You've also got the Pax Mongolica, you've got that trade across The Steppe. You have the caravans on the Sahara, you have a whole lot of other kinds of things going on. And the way the game is structured, you don't have to be a colonizer to win. There are victory conditions that have nothing to do with colonization. But on the flip side of that, going out, exploring, and settling new lands is, yes, something that non-European powers did."

Returning to Johnson's motivation for working on Civ 7, the possibility that someone will be inspired to investigate the past is not something he sees as a side benefit—he says it's why he took the job.

"That's why I'm here, really," he told me. "I just want people to appreciate the world and the strangeness of the world. Because if you appreciate how the past was different, or how other places are different, you can change your everyday as well. Then that opens up new worlds. That makes new worlds possible. If you think this is the only way it can be, the only way it should be, then you're locked into a static existence, and that's dull."

Civilization 7 is scheduled to release on February 11 on Steam and consoles, and you can read my full feature on the game in the latest issue of PC Gamer. The short version is that I had a good time beating up on Rome and struggling to build a sensible Great Wall, and expect Civ 7 to be fun, and as usual for the series, divisive. Whether or not Firaxis' big changes to the structure (which I explained in an older preview) are a total success, I'm glad that the studio continues to try new things with the series, which is well over 30 years old.

See what's out in January below. For a more zoomed-out view of what's coming out on PC this year, check out our list of 2025's new PC games.

January's big PC release dates

January gaming events

• The Steam Winter Sale is over, but there'll be specials on realtime strategy games from January 20-27. See the full sale schedule in our Steam sale dates guide.
• The 2025 Taipei Game Show is January 23-26

More games releasing in January

• January 9 — Freedom Wars Remastered - Vita RPG remaster (Steam)
• January 13 — Airborne Empire (Early Access) - City builder in the sky (Steam)
• January 15 — Aloft - It's a big month for games set in the sky (Steam)
• January 16 — Assetto Corsa EVO - Racing sim (Steam)
• January 16 — Dynasty Warriors: Origins - More large-scale battles (Steam)
• January 16 — Tales of Graces f Remastered - Action RPG remaster (Steam)
• January 20— Mekkablood: Quarry Assault - Old-school FPS (Steam)
• January 23 — Star Wars: Jedi Power Battles - Retro lightsaber battles (Steam)
• January 23 — Synduality Echo of Ada - Futuristic extraction shooter (Steam)
• January 27 — Virtua Fighter 5 REVO - Rollback netcode and 4K upgrade (Steam)
• January 27 — Space Engineers 2 (Early Access) — Sci-fi sandbox (Steam)
• January 28 — Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap - Horde shooter (Steam)
• January 28 — Tails of Iron 2: Whiskers of Winter - Rat soulslike (Steam)
• January 28 — The Stone of Madness - 18th-century stealth tactics (Steam)
• January 28 — Warside - Advanced Wars-like (Steam)

The purpose of a personal pick is to give some extra love to a game of 2024 that didn't make it into our main Game of the Year awards—a game that, despite it all, we feel deserves some more attention. And yet, I've decided to cheat. Against the Storm did not release this year. Rather, it released December of last year—after we'd already locked in our GOTY picks for 2023. And that's a shame, because—if it had come out a few months earlier—it would almost certainly have been a lock for one of our main awards. Simply, it is one of the best city builders I've played.

When I first started playing, I didn't really know what the game was. I expected something cute and cosy—you get animal folk as your citizens after all. A chill time, maybe a little darkness and foreboding for flavour. I couldn't have been more wrong. Against the Storm is devilish in its details, its structure finely honed to do away with the downtime usually typical of the genre. It doesn't look like it at first, but there is an amazing amount of depth and complexity here.

The magic lies in its roguelike structure. You set out into the forest with a small caravan of civilians, and try to carve out a homely little settlement—keeping your people fed and entertained while creating goods for building and trade. So far, so standard. But wait: the forest doesn't want you here. Each year is divided into three seasons, and while the first two are pretty chill, the third—storm—is where the forest exacts its revenge. As your town grows, so does the hostility of the forest, and thus the number of bad things that can happen during the storm. These modifiers are randomly rolled, and range from inconvenient, like villagers moving slower, to downright dangerous, like villagers dropping dead if they don't have access to housing or complex food or leisure and services.

The forest hurts, but it isn't what kills you. The real threat is your benefactor, the queen—the mysterious figure tasking you to go out, reclaim the forest, and reforge the ancient seals. As you complete tasks and make your citizens happy, your reputation grows. Gain enough reputation and, good job, you win. Conversely, as time passes or your citizens leave from harsh conditions or even die, the queen's impatience grows. Gain enough impatience and, oh no, you're done.

This balance—this struggle between reputation and impatience—is more than just an extra layer of flavour on top of existing mechanics. It sets the whole tone for what you need to do. Stability? Sustainability? Sensibility? No, not here. You're in a race for the queen's approval, and nothing else matters. Nothing is permanent—the resource nodes you find are limited—and so the onus is on you to reach your goal just before everything goes wrong. A good run of Against the Storm feels like you're just about on top of everything you need to do—just enough workers to process just enough resources to create just enough goods to make your people happy enough to earn the final few reputation points needed to win. Usually when I see the end screen on any particular settlement, it's with the surefire knowledge that, had it taken even one more in-game year, everything would have fallen apart.

This sense of impending danger is heightened by the fact that, when you start out, you don't even know what buildings you'll have access to. You gain access to blueprints by hitting milestones along the reputation bar, but each choice is limited. You can pick one of three options, all randomly rolled. Maybe your settlement has humans and foxes, both of whom get a happiness bonus from porridge. Maybe you've even got the right base ingredients. It means nothing if you're not offered the blueprint for a cookhouse or beanery.

Rather than feel frustrating, though, that randomness instead systematises the need for adaptability. Each citizen type has multiple needs—meaning there are always multiple routes to happiness. And, if you get really unlucky, and your blueprint draws won't satisfy any of your people, there are still some options you can take. Traders regularly visit your settlement, selling both goods and passive bonuses. As you cut through the forest you open new glades, each containing new events with rewards if you complete them—and harsh penalties if you fail. There are multiple ways around every problem, even if some require more work than others.

That's the trick to Against the Storm. Its randomness feels more than just a gimmick. It cuts down on the downtime of city builders—the endless striving for perfection and efficiency—and lets you focus on making something quick and dirty, and then abandoning it before everything falls apart. And thanks to the multiple different biomes, species and random modifiers, there's always a new challenge to overcome. I've been slowly working through the difficulties—each adding more complications and systems—and am now embarking on my first prestige run. As I near 100 hours with the game, I'm not slowing down. If anything I'm even more excited to start a new settlement and carve out a temporary home surrounded by a forest that hates me.

With premier stealth-tactics studio Mimimi Games shutting down, Hooded Horse will take over publishing duties for its final game: Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. The 2023 isometric stealth release was widely considered a pinnacle of the genre and one of the year's best games—PC Gamer called it just that with its Best Stealth of 2023 award.

Mimimi announced last year that Shadow Gambit would be its final release, surrendering to the increasingly stressful reality of modern games development in favor of the health of its developers. "Working on increasingly ambitious games took a heavy personal toll on us and our families" it said at the time, wrapping up 15 years of development that included hits like Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun and Desperados 3.

Hooded Horse is an up-and-coming strategy publisher, and hopefully a good long-term home for Mimimi's swansong of fantasy Caribbean pirates and their quest for the ultimate treasure on a literal ghost ship. The 2023 release received two really good expansion packs, Zagan's Ritual and Yuki's Wish, before the studio closed up late last year.

"Shadow Gambit is in its final form, and we’re excited to be partnering with Hooded Horse for its ongoing commercial needs," said Mimimi co-founder Johannes Roth in a press release. "We're very impressed by their approach to indie publishing and are confident they will help the game reach even more players."

Shadow Gambit got an 87% review here on PC Gamer, with reviewer Dominic Tarason calling it "Superb squad-based stealth strategy that embraces the magic of save-scumming." Which it definitely does, in a uniquely cool way, by having the whole thing work around time-altering magic.

Here's hoping the genre-defining hit stays available for many years to come.

As Collum put it, "A big challenge in game making is trying to please everyone without watering things down so much that you basically ruin what's special. The truth of the matter is that it will be impossible to please everyone. Instead, we'll always strive to make the best decisions we can which make the game as good as we hope it can be. We'll always be heavily guided directly and indirectly by all of you. It's why we've put the latest patch out as a beta first."

Collum also looked to the future, laying out four changes we can expect to see. For starters, the practice of selling Blood Packs as DLC will end. Previously, the Total War games shipped as bloodless things and you had to buy an add-on that coated your soldiers in red after each battle. It helped keep the age rating of the base game low, and Creative Assembly made a few bucks out of people who want everyone to look like Dragon Age: Origins characters in post-battle dialogue scenes. From now on though, any games where blood is appropriate will come with it as a base feature and age ratings be damned. (If the rumors about a Total War: Star Wars game are true I expect we wouldn't see blood there, while Total War: Warhammer 40,000, should such a thing come to pass, would be drowning in the stuff.)

Second, the launcher's going to die. As it currently stands, no matter which storefront you own a Total War game on, launching it instead launches the Total War launcher first. It's not entirely pointless since it also serves as a mod manager, and so Collum says the team wants to have something to handle mod management ready to go before the launcher is removed. But it is going to go away at some point.

Next up: "Factions will no longer be an early-adopter bonus". Used to be that if you pre-ordered a Total War game or bought it in the first week of release you'd get the first faction DLC for free. In Total War: Warhammer 3, for instance, that meant the Ogre Kingdoms. From now on, Collum says, "we will still ensure some form of bonus such as discounts," but the practice of putting one faction aside for early adopters and making everyone else pay for it separately will die a death.

The final announcement is that the Shadows of Change DLC for Warhammer 3, released last year to much gnashing of teeth, will be broken up. As was the case for subsequent expansions Thrones of Decay and Omens of Destruction, Shadows of Change will be made available as three separate add-ons for players who just want one bit of it rather than the whole enchilada.

These are all fan-pleasing changes, addressing things the commentariat has been vocally complaining about for a while. Although I'm sure they'll find new things to fill their diapers about after these changes are made.

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer: I had the pleasure of reviewing Tactical Breach Wizards when it came out this year, and it really is a prime example of a game that defines exactly what it's here to do, what vibe it's here to capture, and then proceeds to get full marks on every one of its own set goals. When the only problem a game gives me is that I wish there was more of it, I can pretty confidently say it's a banger.

As for the why, well, Tactical Breach Wizards' mechanics are just plain magic—each character has their own specific niche that manages to interact strategically with their fellow spec-ops casters in inventive ways. Take navy seal Zan Vesker, who can create an army of temporary time-clones which, with the right upgrades, both fire a fleet of bullets and refund their mana cost when they die before the turn's up. When combined with necromedic Banks' flask, which hits in a handy three-by-three square for just enough damage to kill them? Utter pandemonium.

All that tactical goodness would be enough to make it a solid 17-20 hours of fun, but its story is way better than it's got any right to be, tucked as it is into a limited handful of cutscenes. It's just downright excellent, with some surprisingly interesting worldbuilding shoved in the boot. Tactical Breach Wizards left me with a yearning for a tabletop system based in its world that doesn't yet exist—or even a feature-length RPG. The in-mission chatter is also a highlight, too.

There's this belief that you can't have funny, banter-flooded dialogue without dipping into the dreaded "Marvel syndrome"—where everything is irreverent and sincere moments aren't allowed to breathe without an improvised mug to the camera. This game proves that problem a mere skill issue.

One moment I was laughing my butt off at Jen Kellen bickering with her own dream clone, the next I was genuinely getting misty-eyed as Sabin went into the specifics of how her faith treats the departed. The game takes clever advantage of its breach, shoot, repeat structure to have these conversations take place outside the door you're about to kick in—making them nice breathers in between the brain-bending tactical action.

Overall—Tactical Breach Wizard deserves my praise. If the idea of a romp where a navy seer seal kicks down a door with a staff-gun sounds like a good time, I can promise you'll have a great one.

Fraser Brown, Online Editor: As the resident tactical sicko (it's not as cool as it sounds), I assumed that Tactical Breach Wizards' violent, puzzle-like conundrums would be the highlight here, and to be clear: they absolutely are. But honestly TBW could have been half as good as a tactics game and I would still have been enchanted.

That's down to the big laughs. The MCU has made me deeply suspicious of super-powered weirdos engaging in quips and bants. But TBW's dialogue, even in just the first hour, elicited so many guffaws. These characters aren't mere vehicles for jokes, cardboard cutouts who exist solely for giggles—their pasts, neurosis and relationships build them into something so much richer. Even if, primarily, they are a very funny bunch. It's the delicious cherry on top of what is a tight, clever tactical romp.

Jake Tucker, Editorial Director, PC Gaming Show: Of all of the games Tom Francis has made about throwing people out of windows, this is the best one. Fascinating skills and interesting scenarios combine for top tier defenestration. It's even fun when you aren't throwing people out of windows.

To finish our round-up of the most interesting hidden gems buried in your PC Game Pass subscription, we're taking a trip back in time—back to the days when RTSes ruled the PC. Rise of Nations was quietly revolutionary back when it released in the early 2000s—with a much bigger scope than you'd see from your C&Cs and StarCrafts. And 2014's excellent Extended Edition is right there on Game Pass for you to try.

Rise of Nations stood out for borrowing from all of the many strategy subgenres. It was an RTS, yes, but one that also borrowed some 4X ideas from powerhouses like Civilization. It's an era-spanning game that runs from ancient times to the modern day—letting you pick from a selection of historical periods, and then research new tech to give you an R&D advantage over your opponents.

And it's not just war either—there's diplomacy and espionage to consider too, and even a turn-based layer that lets you plot out your actions on the world map. And fortunately, despite Rise of Nation's age, the Extended Edition works perfectly on modern PCs—and also comes with the base game's expansion, too. It's the definitive version of an RTS classic.

Despite being such an enduring videogame setting, the great cosmic void beyond our planet is often treated as window dressing: an excuse to meet funky alien races and blow stuff up with colourful lasers. The mechanical complexities of space are largely relegated to sims like Elite Dangerous or Kerbal Space Program. 

This is even true for otherwise incredibly detailed games like the many 4X romps that use space as a setting. The fantastic Stellaris, for instance, might have crammed in every sci-fi trope imaginable, but if you transposed the whole thing onto a planet's surface, surprisingly little would need to meaningfully change—at least not mechanically. 

Sins of a Solar Empire 2, then, feels particularly special. In practical terms, everything is still happening on a 2D plane (unlike, say, Homeworld 3, where ships have full 3D movement), but it still has one significant wrinkle that keeps things interesting: celestial mechanics. 

The solar systems you fight over are not static maps, you see. Instead, the planets, moons and asteroids move along a predetermined path, dancing across the map as the war progresses—all in real-time. For any would-be conquerors, this has massive ramifications, forcing frequent adjustments as your plans shift in conjunction with the movement of the planets. 

That juicy enemy world your fleet is primed to invade, for instance, might be impossible to reach directly 10 minutes in the future. Phase lanes are how gravity wells connect to their neighbours, you see, but as the map shifts, those phase lanes can be broken. This might trap your fleet behind enemy lines, or make what was previously a quick jump to a neighbouring planet an epic journey through a series of enemy-infested worlds. 

All of this forces you to maintain an agile strategy; it means you're never able to get too comfortable. You might enjoy 30 minutes of relative peace in the early game, all your foes spread out across the system, but that can all end violently when a heavily armed world suddenly connects to one of your own, and a huge armada of alien vessels pour out of the phase lane. 

That's a good thing, though, because Sins 2 sports some of the best space brawls around. Itty-bitty fighters weaving between imposing capital ships, bristling with turrets, each acting independently as they blow missiles out of the heavens and track individual vessels. Colossal titans bombarding worlds or using their massive hulls to block torpedo salvos. Space stations, missile boats, planets ringed with defense platforms, super weapons capable of destroying entire worlds—god, it's good. 

Honestly, if this was just an RTS, it would keep you busy enough, but Sins 2 is also a 4X. So as well as conducting your various wars, you've got trading vessels, a galactic marketplace, diplomacy between major and minor factions, worlds to develop and exploit, huge research trees to work your way through—being a space tyrant is pretty involved, it turns out. 

But somehow, it's not all too much. Ironclad smartly didn't get too bold with its sequel, and while there are new mechanics to consider and a lot of different moving parts to figure out—a lot of them dependent on which faction you pick—it's also fairly streamlined. You can be very hands-on, but you can also trust in the automation, focusing on the big picture while the AI handles the minute details, whether it's fighting or building fleets. 

If you want to build something you haven't researched, for instance, you can simply click on the build menu, and (as long as you have the funds) the game will automatically start researching the prerequisite techs. Ships will also automatically join fleets, and you can request new ships directly from existing fleets, no matter where they are on the map, which means they'll head directly towards your armada the moment they leave the shipyard. It's just enough to let you focus on the parts of the game that interest you the most, but none of this automation stops you from directly fiddling with every part of your empire. 

This all leads to Sins 2 being an extremely accessible RTS 4X without sacrificing the complexity that makes these kinds of games so damn compelling. Which is to say, you really don't have an excuse not to try it out. 

Specifically Long War of the Chosen 1.2.0, which landed on Steam on December 16—one year to the day since the mod's last version.

The patch notes are as immense as you'd expect for such a mod, weighing in at 9,445 words and drilling down into microscopic details like "Warlock Mind Scorch can now also target SPARKs" and "Danger zone moved from TSgt to SSgt, allows suppression gunners to be able to get both cup and danger zone, buff to suppression builds."

I'm going to be honest: it's been a few years since I've played War of the Chosen and I never dabbled with this version of the Long War mod, so it's almost all bafflingly dense patchese to me. But nothing gets me cheering like modders dedicated to tinkering with and enriching their favorite games for years and years after release. Same goes for the developers themselves, to be honest—another longtime Steam standby, Project Zomboid, just got a similarly huge update this week, its first in three years.

One notable change with LWOTC 1.2.0 is that the mod now requires XCOM 2's Shen's Last Gift DLC, which awkwardly isn't available to buy standalone on the Steam store (you've got to get it in a bundle). The XCOM Ultimate Collection happens to be 89% off as of this writing, though, so it's not too pricey to grab it.

LWOWTC 1.2.0's many updates have been in the works on the mod's experimental branch for the last year and should be compatible with existing saves, though due to some major rebalancing and new additions, you're probably better off with a fresh save. You didn't have other plans for the rest of the year, did you?

If you're looking for some beginner's tips or installation help with the mod, head on over to the LWOTC Discord.