I continued my Catherine game with a new Livestreaming session at roughly the halfway point of the Exploration age. Isabella's elimination had reduced the number of AI opponents to four and I was mostly hoping that I could avoid further conflicts to speed up the pace of the gameplay. My primary focus returned to settling as much of the map as possible; I had control over the entirety of the island chain off to my east which contained a bunch of the treasure fleet resources. The western islands had been an especially sad lot and then further west beyond that I ran into the core territories of Amina and Trung Trac. The only other part of the map that remained unclaimed was the deep south on the other continent (the AIs on both continents doing a terrible job of prioritizing these regions) where I had already founded three settlements and had another settler en route. There were also a few more independent powers down there which I began befriending as soon as possible with my dominant influence. Some of the other independent powers located out on the island chains were having their 15 or 30 turn befriending countdown reach its ending point, leading to screenshots like this one:
Hmmm, I wonder which benefit to choose here, 6 food in the capital city or 396 gold/turn which will continue scaling upwards over the rest of the era, tough call. Like so many other aspects of Civ7's gameplay, the balance was laughably off when it came to picking the various city state alliance perks. These problems were masked in the unmodded game, however, since those helpful gold yield previews are not displayed when playing normally and only show up when using the policy yield previews mod (which I consider to be mandatory to have any idea what's really going on). It was a bad decision to have so many of the city state benefits work on a per-city state and percentage basis, ensuring that they would scale multiplicatively over time. These were enough of an issue that they were all removed in the next patch (Patch 1.2.5), which was probably a good thing for the gameplay even if it was frustrating to see. I was holding off on patching the game during this streaming session since I didn't want to change up the gameplay halfway through this venture.
All told, I was able to reach 23 settlements before the rest of the unclaimed land was snapped up. Everything remaining consisted of tiny islands or little nooks squeezed in between mature cities, places that I was content to let the AIs claim if they desired. I ended up with roughly half of those settlements becoming cities while the other half remained as towns, a split that seemed to work pretty well as the fishing towns with low-quality land could provide food to feed the various cities. Basically, if there was enough room to build a bunch of districts then I turned the spot into a city, otherwise I kept the location as a town and specialized it. I wouldn't have been able to claim this much territory without running that gameplay mod that doubled the settlement cap over the normal number. I was using this game as a test for that mechanic, and I can definitively state that the mod worked fantastically well. It's quite clear to me that there is *ZERO* reason for Civ7 to have a settlement limit. No other game in the Civilization series has ever had a hard settlement cap and the game works perfectly well without one in place. The gameplay doesn't need an artificial limit to expansion, what it needs is an AI that aggressively settles the map and competes over territory. The player shouldn't be able to reach double the settlements of the Deity AI with minimal effort.
I took an overview screenshot of my territory on the round number of Turn 50, only to then have this happen on the next turn:
Xerxes stirred up trouble by declaring war on Franklin which then forced me to join as well or else dissolve our alliance partnership. This is why I dislike signing alliances in Civ7, as the AI never seems to be able to refrain from leaping into wars and then dragging the player along with them. Anyway, conflict had come to my doorstep and Franklin had been enough of a jerk throughout this game that I didn't mind humbling him a bit. The previous 15 turns of peace had given me enough time to redeploy my fleet commander and most of my carracks over from Isabella's former territory to the waters north of Franklin's core. That fleet commander is visible as the ship with the "4" number in the picture above, poised to begin the assault on Ravenna. I knew that the key to winning any military conflict with Franklin would be naval power, lots and lots of ships to seize control of that Mediterranean-like body of water between us along with dominating the outer islands.
Thus I began cash-rushing a new carrack every turn in every settlement near Franklin's territory. Riverview in particular was getting a new carrack each turn for essentially the whole duration of the war. Each carrack cost a paltry 145 gold and I was making well over 1000 gold/turn which meant that I had an unlimited amount of miltiary power at my disposal. Units really, really need to be more expensive in Civ7 as their cheapness allows everyone to flood the map and inevitably causes a Carpet of Doom. Franklin had his own swarm of units thanks to the Deity cost discounts and began embarking unit after unit into the waters in an attempt to reach Riverside. I shot them down in droves, with both my ships and my land-based crossbows, until the waters ran red with the blood of the Normans. For all of his absurd unit spam, Franklin wasn't doing much in the way of shipbuilding and the few carracks that he did produce were quickly pounced on and destroyed. My fleet commander was soon boosting the attacks of eight Spanish carracks, shooting and shooting and shooting the enemy as I attempted to kill them fast than Franklin could train them. Over the course of half a dozen turns, I removed the defenses of Ravenna along with its three other fortified districts which allowed a knight to make the official capture:
The Civ7 interface does a truly terrible job of highlighting which fortified tiles have to be captured to take the city; I had to mouseover everything individually until discovering that there was a Norman Donjon district southwest of the city where my yellow knight is pictured above. That district did not have the "walls" visual indicator but still counted as a fortified tile that had to be captured despite no explanation whatosever from the gameplay - awesome. The saving grace here was the fleet commander with the promotion that added +1 range, allowing every carrack to fire three tiles inland. They were doing enough damage to clear a path for my knight to reach that Donjon tile and capture it, even though Franklin was relentlessly spamming a unit on every single tile. It's so, so tedious to fight through that kind of swarm and these turns dragged out horribly in real-world time as a result. The need to kill all of those endless units, along with the +8 combat strength bonus on Deity, does make it difficult to conquer territory. However, the AI remains utterly clueless at waging offensive warfare, or even doing anything with those units aside from standing in the way. My exposed knight in the picture above was *NOT* killed on the resulting interturn even though it was completely surrounded by enemy units. Franklin's military mostly shuffled around in place doing nothing on his turns while I blasted them over and over again. 
It's been 15 years now and I won't stop repeating this point: One Unit Per Tile utterly ruined the military side of Civilization's gameplay.
Elsewhere on the map, I had a smaller squadron of carracks attacking Franklin's southernmost city. This one lacked any fortified districts and I was able to capture it without much trouble before sending those ships further northward along the western coast. Franklin also had a series of embarked units threatening my town of Roanoke in the western island chain. Those units were unescorted by any ships which allowed yet another series of carracks cash-rushed out of Roanoke to send them to the bottom of the ocean. My ships had a huge combat strength bonus from city state alliances which should have been enough to one-shot the embarked units, though apparently there's a hidden defensive modifier that embarked units get which limited them to 40-50 damage per attack. Of course there's a hidden, unexplained modifier - what else would you expect from this game? I could have captured Franklin's tiny island colonies with ease, except that they were completely useless and would have counted against that stupid settlement cap, which made them not worth having. I hate Civ7's map generation for creating so many useless tiny islands, which the AI always rushes to settle and then it becomes super hard to eliminate them. It's like the whole mechanic exists solely to annoy the human player.
Once Ravenna was under my control, I had my main fleet wheel further westward and began the assault on Aritim as well. There was another four fortified districts to be captured here, two of them once again lacking the walls graphic and giving no indication that they had to be taken, as the AI had apparently built the two halves of the Norman Donjon on two different tiles which both had to be taken. On that note, how dumb is the AI that it can't build the two halves of its unique district on the same tile? Seriously?! Come on guys! 
Anyway, I had to keep fighting through unit spam but there really wasn't anything that Franklin could do since he couldn't touch my naval dominance. Aritim soon fell as well:
Ten turns had now passed since the initial hostilities which opened up the potential for a peace treaty. I had put enough of a hurting on Franklin that he was willing to give me a city in the treaty; I chose his original capital of Roma which looked to be the strongest of the available options. I certainly could have kept pushing and taken the rest of his core territory on the starting continent, however I was already sitting at the expanded settlement cap of 27/27 and these turns had taken so long to play that I simply wanted to be done with the fighting. Franklin had lost about half of his territory, reduced to four cities on the starting continent and then four additional useless towns on tiny overseas islands. I could only hope that he wouldn't bother me again.
It might have been only Turn 63 but the Exploration age was essentially finished at this point as well. I had already researched every tech and every civic, with my Spanish civ now working on the "future tech" versions of each for the attribute point bonuses. Those attribute points have been nerfed in patching (of course); they used to be Wildcard points that could be distributed anywhere, and instead now are assigned to random categories which are far less useful. One of them went into the Military category which was completely useless for this game. In terms of the legacy scoring goals, I had locked down the tier 3 scoring in every category without much trouble. Collecting a dozen relics was easy to do, hitting the five tiles with 40 yield just required placing specialists intelligently, and I had enough overseas settlements that the expansion goal only required converting a couple of them to my religion. The Economic category is the only one that I worried about, largely because of the travel time needed to bring all of the treasure fleets home. I held off delivering the fleets until I was certain that I had 30 of them in place, then mass-delivered everything at once to make sure that I hit the target before time ran out.
That proved to be unnecessary due to the new 10 turn countdown that preceded the end of the Exploration age. It began on Turn 63 (which would have been the final turn of the age under the old system) and lasted for another 11 turns until finishing on Turn 74. I don't know why there's an extra turn in the countdown, I guess the player gets ten additional turns after the current turn once the countdown begins. On the one hand, I'm glad that this new mechanic exists and the player gets a warning period before the age concludes. It was insane how the original system could suddenly add 15% to the era meter and the age would finish with absolutely no warning ahead of time. On the other hand, the 10 turn countdown is also dreadfully dull and contributes to the feeling that many of these turns don't matter at all. It's not interesting to play ten more turns knowing that any non-ageless buildings constructed during this period will instantly go obsolete at the start of the next age - what's the point? Civ7 has somehow managed to take the boring, uninteresting turns at the end of a normal Civilization game and TRIPLE them by repeating the same tedium at the end of all three ages. How could they have possibly thought this was a good idea?
So I basically flung money around in the concluding turns and cash-rushed a whole bunch of buildings in my developing overseas colonies, under the logic that even obsolete cultural and science buildings would still provide some of their yields at the start of the next era. I was making 4000 gold/turn and knew that I could only bring about 10k money into the next era so it was a spend or lose situation. The comparative yields in the screenshot above indicated once again how badly I was curb-stomping the AI leaders, outpacing them by massive margins in every category. I could cakewalk to any victory condition desired from this point, I was only heading for the cultural ending for the novelty of the situation. As for the Exploration age scoring goals:
It wasn't especially close there either. The AI leaders can compete in exactly one of these categories: the Cultural one, since they spam ridiculous numbers of missionaries and will eventually get all of the relics. Missionaries can't be attacked or impeded in any way so this goal is guaranteed if the civ in question trains enough missionaries. They looked somewhat competitive on the Military and Science goals but their performance in both was illusory. Franklin's 8 Military points were a total joke: he had four settlements on tiny overseas islands and converted them all to his religion, that was worth 8 points under this idiotic scoring system. Amina was next-best at 4 points based on... two settlements on tiny islands that also had her religion. Why in the world does the gameplay think that this asinine behavior is worth scoring legacy points? In the Science category, Trunc Trac actually managed to hit the goal... because she was running the Majapahit civ which gets +1 to the specialist limit. Even the poorly developed AI cities can hit 40 yields on a tile if they're allowed to place 4 specialists together. And when it came to the Economic category, I mean, yikes. I've never seen the AI get more than a handful of treasure fleet points and they utterly failed at the goal once again. All of these scoring goals are badly chosen and the AI stinks at trying to achieve them - not great when this is the core mechanic behind the entire ages concept!
Experience has taught me that the only thing which matters when picking a Modern era civ is their innate bonuses. Unique units or unique districts are almost always irrelevant because the game will simply end before they can come into use. I therefore selected Mexico for my Modern civ solely because of their Revolucion government, which would increase culture generation by a whopping 30% while in a celebration. Mexico's unique district would have been nice to have for additional cultural generation as well, though as expected I would never end up constructing any of them in this game. For my legacies, I picked the Treasure Fleet Golden Age to maintain all of my cities into the next era, then a bunch of attribute points in various different categories. Picking those attribute points was interesting in my first few games of Civ7 but has also gotten stale and repetitive by this point. There's no variation and little in the way of interesting decisions to be made, just take the options that increase your yield of choice (culture for this game) as much as possible.
Then I had to go through the era transition into the Modern era - uggggggggh. I played the final 10 turns of the Exploration age countdown along with the era transition into the Modern age while I was offline because the whole process was incredibly boring to watch. I know I've written this a bunch of times before, but it is so goddarn tedious to go through EVERY city and EVERY unit and reassign EVERY resource and assign a new specialization to EVERY town, etc. It took me well over an hour to run through the process and all that I could think was that I wanted to abandon the game rather than continue. These era transitions break up the flow of the game in the worst way possible, sigh. When I had finally sorted everything out, my Mexican civ looked like this:
While I was still comfortably ahead of the rival AI civs, my yields had taken a catastrophic fall in every category. I had collapsed from 4000 gold/turn income to barely over 1000, my cultural output had gone from 3600/turn to 950/turn, and so on. It was painful having every Exploration age building go obsolete at the same time that every city state alliance disappeared, to be replaced for no clear reason with new independent powers occupying the same tiles. I simply cannot understand how the developers thought that this would be fun for players to experience; most of the hard work that I had achieved in the previous era simply went up in smoke with absolutely no way of preventing it. Now I simply wanted to race across the Cultural finish line to be done with this game as soon as possible.
I snapped the picture above at the end of my offline session and then planned to run one more Livestreaming sequence to knock out the short Modern era. However, when I tried to resume a week later, Steam refused to load Civ7 until I applied the recent 1.2.5 patch. I had been able to use the older patch in offline mode previously but that no longer seemed to be the case. I spent a good 30 minutes trying to find a workaround before accepting that I had no choice but to apply this new patch. I really, really didn't want to do that because Patch 1.2.5 made major gameplay changes designed to neuter all sorts of effective player strategies. The effects of the new patch were felt immediately when I tried to construct my first buildings:
Imagine my shock when the museum, the tier 1 culture building for this era, cost a whopping 1428 production (!) Later I captured the image above where a rail station cost 2856 production to build which would have taken close to 30 turns in my capital, my highest production city. For comparison purposes, the Modern era wonders cost either 1000 or 1200 production each, making the world wonders cheaper to construct than an ordinarily building. What in the world was going on here? Well, the recent patch introduced a new gameplay mechanic: production cost scaling for buildings. Buildings grow more expensive for *EACH* city that the player owns, as well as *EACH* building previously constructed in the same city. And yes, obsolete buildings still count as making new buildings more expensive despite their yields having been nerfed into the ground after each era transition. I had 14 cities on the map and my capital of Maldthens was stuffed full of infrastructure from previous eras, which had the effect of making new buildings insanely expensive to produce. The museum is supposed to cost 420 production so it was facing something like a 340% cost increase over the base value. And every other building was equally expensive, to the point where it was essentially impossible to build anything in any of my cities.
I really do not have words for what a castrophic blunder this new mechanic represents. Somehow the developers managed to take the gameplay from the disastrous release version of Civ7 and make it even worse. The player is now actively penalized for expanding across the map, actively penalized for adding more cities and building infrastructure in their settlements. It's not enough to have that stupid settlement cap, no, now there has to be another penalty for each new city added. The consensus online seems to be that it's no longer worth having more than 3 or 4 cities as the scaling penalty on buildings becomes too high. Just get a handful of cities and leave everything else as towns - it's literally Civ5's "science penalty for each new city" mechanic all over again. Civ7's developers have spoken: you can have 3-4 cities and that's it, no more for you. It's yet another empire-building game that seemingly hates the notion that the player might want to build an empire.
I detest this mechanic with the heat of a thousand suns and you will not see me play another game of Civ7 until it's removed. 
Anyway, I was not a happy camper and the video recording of this Livestreaming session featured two hours of me calling the Civ7 developers idiots in a dozen different ways. But I was nearly done with this game and I thought it was worth the effort to drag its rotting carcass across the finish line. To win the Cultural victory in Civ7, I needed to dig up 15 artifacts and then build the World's Fair wonder. Those artifacts can only be excavated by Explorer units, which are unlocked by researching the Natural History civic and then moved across the map just like missionaries in the previous era. Natural History civic was already half researched thanks to my "future tech" civics from the previous era, so I knocked that out in a single turn's research and started rush-buying explorers. The first explorer cost 400 production, then the second one cost 800 production, then 1200 production and so on in escalating fashion. This quickly made them astronomically expensive but it was still worthwhile to invest the 10,000 gold that I'd carried over from the previous era into as many explorers as fast as possible. I think that I ended up getting the 2800 cost explorer for seven of them in total, spaced out around the world since I could cash-rush them at any destination of my choosing.
Once I had those explorers moving around on the map, they had to move to a university or an observatory left over from the Exploration age where they could carry out the "Research Artifacts" mission. This will then reveal the location of the artifacts themselves on the map, and it has to be done for each separate "continent" on the map. This is the only use for the continents mechanic in Civ7 and it's bizarre that there's a whole lens devoted to this niche feature. This map had four total continents so I had to do the "Research Artifacts" mission four different times in different parts of the world, followed by sending explorers to the completely random spots where the artifacts popped up afterwards. The extraction process looks like this:
Move the explorer to the indicated tiles and pick the "Excavate Artifact" mission, which then takes five turns to complete - five turns! Why does this require five turns?! It's pointless padding of the most ridiculous sort, extending out the length of the game for no reason whatsoever. There was nothing to be done other than wait out the timer though, which was the same for all of the explorers doing their investigations. Natural History civic unlocks the artifacts from the Exploration age, which apparently correspond to two per continent. The mastery civic for Natural History also allows explorers to claim an artifact from each natural wonder on the map, like the pictured Mount Kilimanjaro. The natural wonders were extremely difficult to spot on the map, though they did gain the little white circle when I flipped the lens over to continents mode (no search function in this game like Civ6 had). Relics from natural wonders can be claimed by anyone, however the other relics are one-time use only and can be claimed on a first-come, first-serve basis. The player has to collect them quickly before they're gone because the AI does prioritize going for the relics.
This map therefore had eight relics to be claimed from the Exploration age, plus about four more relics via natural wonders. That obviously wasn't enough to hit the 15 relics needed to achieve victory, and thus there's a second set of artifacts associated with the Ancient age which unlock upon reaching Hegemony civic towards the end of the civics tree. Winning a Cultural victory in Civ7 is therefore all about racing to Hegemony as fast as possible to unlock that second group of artifacts; this is why I knew anything in the Mexican civics tree would be pointless, as I would have to spend all my culture pushing towards Hegemony. (It's also really important to defog the whole map in the prior Exploration age to be able to see exactly where the artifacts appear.) When reaching Hegemony, the players has to go through the same "Research Artifacts" mission once again on each continent, with the Ancient artifacts only popping up afterwards. Hegemony also has this amazing flavor text: "Gain a free Artifact when Researching Artifacts". Huh?! What this actually means is that doing the explorer mission to reveal where the Ancient artifacts are located will itself also award the player an artifact. Did anyone proofread this game's text - like, at all?
Not much happened over the following turns as I moved explorers around the map and dug up artifacts. I had of course used my influence to befriend every independent power on the map (even though I was only able to carry over 1000 influence from the prior age); it was a trivial task to start the countdown friendship clock with everyone. The AI civs don't seem to make any effort at all to befriend them, instead rabidly attacking and trying to kill the IPs for no reason whatsoever. I had to use units to block AI attacks on a bunch of the independent powers and managed to keep almost all of them alive to deliver their various bonuses over to me. Sadly, every single percentage-based bonus has been removed from the city states in Patch 1.2.5. While I agree that those benefits were too strong when stacked up together, it stinks that all of the most powerful stuff that they provided has been taken out of the game entirely. I'd rather have the city states provide strong benefits, but the AI actually competes for the alliances instead of ceding them all to the player without a contest. The AI leaders were able to do this in Civ6 so I really don't understand why they're so helpless in Civ7.
Similarly, all of the percentage-based bonuses have been removed from the attribute point system as well. I received an attribute point in the Economic tree for some reason and scrolled down to the bottom, only to find... this option. The capper to the Economic tree used to be 5% more gold and could be taken repeatedly if desired. Now the final policy yields 5 gold, per age, flat. 
This is beyond terrible, it's so bad that I was downright insulted when I saw it for the first time. So your reward for achieving half a dozen Economic attribute points and making it down to the bottom of the tree is... 15 gold/turn. That would be a weak choice in the Ancient era and it was downright risible here in the Modern period. What kind of a reward was this?! It wasn't enough that the future tech rewards had to be randomized, now the keystone policy in each attribute tree is total garbage too? Do the developers of Civ7 actively hate their own player base? Everything fun and interesting about the gameplay keeps getting removed to cover up the atrociously bad AI. Even though the interface has been improving in the patches, I actually think the gameplay is getting worse since every new mechanic keeps moving in the wrong direction.
There's not much more for me to report. I steadily dug up more artifacts, reaching Hegemony civic on Turn 18 and then began doing the same process a second time. All of my cities had just enough time to build a single museum, then I set them on wonders or research projects because it was clear the game would end before they could construct a second building. After cash-rushing all those explorers, I saved the rest of my income to cash-rush the production buildings in my capital of Maldthens. The capital itself was sitting around with an empty build queue, stacking up production via Shift-Enter turn abuse so that I could have it begin the World's Fair immediately upon digging up the 15th artifact. I didn't feel bad about this either, as otherwise I would be forced to sit around doing nothing and hitting End Turn for another 15-20 turns after all of the artifacts were in my possession. (The game should simply end after digging up 15 artifacts, forcing the player to construct an additional wonder is utterly pointless. Better yet would be a different victory condition entirely since this whole thing is silly.)
When I excavated the final artifact on Turn 23, the capital was able to start the World's Fair in earnest. The in-city interface said it would take 6 turns, then the worldmap view of the city said it would take 5 turns to complete. But surprise! Maldthens actually had 3000 production saved up in its build queue already, so the game ended on the next turn:
Thus we ended with one final miserable failure from the game's interface which apparently had no idea how many turns it would take to construct the World's Fair. I was destroying every AI leader in every yield and could have easily achieved any victory condition that I wanted. What a dull end to a dull game.
The AI is actually better at achieving the Cultural victory condition than any of the others in Civ7, not that you would know it from looking at this screen. Trung Trac managed to get one artifact that was deep within her territory and I think Xerxes pulled an artifact from Mount Kilimanjaro. That was it. At no point in time has any AI leader put up even the slighest competition for any of the victory conditions across my various games of Civ7. They are complete duds, even worse at winning the game than the AI leaders in Civ5 and Civ6. I don't know how we seem to be regressing further and further backwards with each new game in the series but these guys put up no challenge at all, even on the highest difficulty level.
I mean, what else can I say at this point? Civ7 is simply a bad game. The fundamental gameplay mechanics are entirely based around tearing down what the player has built, taking control and agency away from the player while railroading them down preset paths, forcing them onto the narrow lanes that the developers wanted them to follow. The scoring conditions are poorly designed and the AI is a total joke that can't compete in most of the categories. While there have been some improvements to the map generation and the user interface, that's been offset by the developers relentlessly nerfing or outright removing every effective player strategy. The introduction of building maintenance is an absolute killer that destroys any interest that I have in playing this game. Absolutely not, no thank you, I am not touching your product again until this is gone. Between that mechanic, plus the settlement limit, plus the town/city concept, it's very clear that the developers do not want players to build more than a handful of cities. The fact that they hate the entire empire-building concept in their empire-building game is yet another sign that they simply do not get it. Civ7's developers fundamentally do not understand this genre and they fundamentally do not understand their own players. The future of Civ7, and the wider Civilization series as a whole, looks bleak right now.
