Update: It’s now live, full notes here.
Original story continues below:
Civ 7 beefy update 1.2.5 arrives today, September 30th. Developers Firaxis have laid out its major tweaks and additions, which include new map types and city states, plus a revamp of the construction interface and a hefty helping of balancing.
The polarising 4X strategy nation-builder has gotten the likes of auto-explore and world wonder reworks in its last couple of monthly updates, with Firaxis having settled in for the long haul after an initial flurry of post-release tweaking. 1.2.5 is the first update the game’s gotten since an undisclosed number of workers – “dozens of people”, according to Game Developer sources – were laid off at Firaxis earlier this month, in what publishers 2K told RPS was a “staff reduction” as the studio “restructures and optimizes its development process for adaptability, collaboration, and creativity”.
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As outlined in the developer update video above, which is set to be followed by the full notes when the update goes live later today, the headline changes of 1.2.5 include the introduction of two new map types. These are dubbed Continents and Islands and Pangea and Islands, with both making use of improved map generation techniques in the form of Voronoi diagrams to grow their landmasses. For more on that, check out Edwin’s piece on Firaxis senior graphics engineer Ken Pruiksma’s recent deep-dive into coloured geographical blobs.
Also new are two types of city state, which can crop up in any era. Expansionist states, as their name suggests, are most focused on population growth via acquiring land and food, while diplomatic ones are focused more on keeping their citizens happy and doing, well, diplomacy. Both come with different bonuses if you become suzerain of them, with existing city state bonuses also having been revamped.
That balancing has also been applied to various other aspects of Civ 7’s economy, such as the maintenance costs of larger armies being uppe, so you’ve got to think a bit more about whether you need fifty different mobile cannons. That and other things you might spend gold on in later ages have been rendered a bit more expensive, in an effort to ensure the precious metal isn’t too valuable as you get into modern times. It’ll be interesting to see if those tweaks have nailed the right balance and don’t potentially end up frustrating folks who prefer to spend a bit more freely.
In terms of Leaders, Napoleon’s Emperor and Revolutionary forms have been buffed, with the former getting greater rewards from the use of sanctions, while the latter earns more culture from battles. Finally, as part of continued efforts to revamp Civ 7’s initialy panned interface, building menus have been retooled to offer more info in terms of the numerical effects changes to tiles will have before you make them. “We won’t tell you the best tile to pick, that’s still up to you,” Firaxis senior game designer Taymoor Rehman said of these tweaks in that dev video. “But the UI should take a lot of the guesswork out.” The studio have also put out a larger blog diving into the fine details of these number-heavy interface revampings.
That’s it in terms of big changes in this update, but Rehman did indicate that the balancing bits of it are “only step one of a larger balance pass”, so there’s more number tweakage to come down the line as Firaxis keep cranking away at cash and goods-related knobs and levers.
