Catherine of Greece / Spain / Mexico
Small map, Fractal, 5 AI Opponents
Deity difficulty
Patch 1.2.4
Watch this game on YouTube (Playlist Link)
The first year of Civ7's release has been nothing short of a disaster and I can't say that I've spent that much time playing this game in recent months. Still, I do try to mix things up when playing strategy games on Livestream so that it's not simply an endless series of Civ4 and Master of Orion games (though I'd probably get more viewers if I did that). Thus I decided to revisit Civ7 once again at the beginning of Fall 2025, roughly seven months after the game's debut and after a series of patches had come out. My general impression of the patches is that they've done a decent job of cleaning things up around the edges, including a number of quality-of-life interface improvements, however the core issues with Civ7 remain and will likely never be resolved. I still don't think that this game is salvageable outside of a complete rework of core gameplay mechanics.
Anyway, I hadn't played out a Cultural victory thus far in Civ7 and decided that this would make a decent theme for a Livestream game. I was planning on using the alternate version of Himiko as my leader, the "High Shaman" version that gets a big bonus to culture generation in exchange for a smaller penalty to science. Unfortuantely, when I went to select this leader she was no longer present on the menu selection screen! I swear that this leader had been there before and then disappeared in one of the patches. I don't think that I was supposed to have the alternate Himiko because I hadn't paid for it as a downloadable extra but that was still weird. I was therefore forced to fall back on my second choice in Catherine who had the less interesting abilities pictured above. Catherine gets a small cultural bonus for each great work, along with extra slots for those great works, which all sounds nice but gets quickly overshadowed by cultural generation elsewhere on the map. Getting 40 culture/turn for your 10 relics in the Exploration age doesn't really matter when the rest of your civ is pulling in 2000 culture/turn. Her other ability of converting culture into science for cities settled in tundra is another one of those "nice to have" bonuses with limited usefulness. I guess her tundra cities are a bit better than everyone else's but all terrain feels identical in Civ7 and unfortunately it doesn't really matter where you place cities in this game.
I picked Greece for my Ancient era civ since they get bonus influence and have a unique quarter that produces culture and happiness. I had of course played Greece previously in my Machiavelli game so I was familiar with them by now; their best attribute is probably their unique policy (Xenia) which reduces the influence cost needed to befriend the independent powers. This is another major problem with Civ7's design: it might sound like there are all these different civilizations to pick between, but because each one only gets used for a third of the gameplay, the player starts running into repeat choices very quickly. There were only 10 total civs to pick between in the Ancient era at release and by this point I had already played all of them, whereas in a normal Civilization game it would have taken much longer to hit that point. I guess the developers just expected everyone to keep buying more civs released as downloadable content, heh.
I had an abortive start on a different map where Charlemagne and Trung Trac both spawned about as close as they could, roughly 15 tiles away from my capital's location in the northern snows. Both of those AI leaders then proceeded to send their first two settlers directly towards me in a straight line, leaving vast amounts of open terrain unclaimed on every side to crowd my starting position. That was absurdly unfair and I really just wanted to play a normal game so I restarted in the next streaming session with the new capital location pictured above. I was located in the tundra yet again, which is completely unavoidable if the player picks Cathy. While I understand that the developers wanted players to make use of her unique abilities, the tundra start bias for Cathy gets really old really fast since the player will ALWAYS begin at the northern or southern edge of the map. I considered this to be a decent but not great starting position, with the sheep tile holding a lot of value but nothing else being particularly useful. It was good enough to be playable though and therefore I was off and rolling.
A gigantic problem with Civ7 is the fact that there's very little variation in the terrain on the map. When you're playing Civ4, there's a massive difference between trying to found cities in lush floodplains valleys versus in tundra or desert wastelands. This is a good thing because it drives conflict over high-quality land as well as creating more variation between games; a start with two gold tiles plays differently from a start with double corn resources versus a start with weak resources like wines and silks. By contrast, all of the land is essentially the same in Civ7. Grassland farms are the same as desert farms which are the same as tundra farms and even ice farms (which don't even make sense). The resources are the only thing that creates any variation, and while they do matter for the early game, they become less and less important for city development as the gameplay continues. The only thing that ends up mattering is having enough tiles to slap down all the buildings and therefore everything quickly feels identical and repetitive. How the developers didn't forsee this and course correct ahead of time is beyond me.
I followed my normal opening for a Civ7 game: triple scouts to grab as many goody huts as possible, then into immediate settlers upon hitting the magical size 5. Outside of exceptionally bad luck, the player can normally collect enough gold to cash-rush the early buildings in the capital instead of having to slow-build them by hand. That was the case once again in this game as I collected a whole bunch of different rewards, picking the gold option whenever it was available. I discovered that my capital was situated along the northern coastline of this continent (of course), with a collection of strong early game resources off to the west in the form of several deer and hide tiles. That would definitely be worth a city placement once I could deal with the hostile independent power in the northwest corner. The main direction of expansion was south though, where there was a nice desert spot with camel and cotton resources and room for hopefully a few more cities beyond that. I didn't know how far I'd be able to push but I intended to be aggressive in claiming land.
The AI competition on this continent turned out to be Xerxes (thankfully the less dangerous Achaemenid version), Franklin, and Isabella. They all had their capitals in the equatorial portion of this continent which had a really funky shape thanks to the Fractal map script I had chosen. For the moment, I spent the minor 20 influence price to give them all a friendly greeting and hoped to stay on their good sides. Otherwise, I was saving my influence to befriend as many independent powers as possible due to the overpowered nature of stacking up their various benefits. Unfortunately, when I settled my first city in the south by those camels it caused a diplomatic rift with Franklin:
Riverview was "too close" to his capital despite being located on the other side of a freaking ocean. 
Civ7 determines this "too close" penalty based on the most basic distance calculation possible: anything within 10 tiles of the AI capital is too close, with no attention paid whatsoever to the intervening terrain. It leads to utterly absurd diplomatic maluses like this one and relations began dropping right away. Franklin also disliked me because I had picked a different government from him - a choice I had to make before I even met his civ! - which sealed a game-long enmity between us. This is incredibly dumb and even though Civ7's diplomatic system can work reasonably well in other contexts, it's a complete failure when it comes to this settling mechanic. At least Xerxes and Isabella both had leader agendas that were pretty easy to achieve: Xerxes didn't want me to create trade routes and Isabella didn't want me to have natural wonders in my borders. I could do both of those things and my relations with the two of them soon blossomed into friendships.
The following turns remained quiet as I continued peacefully developing my civ. I should mention here that I was playing with one mod that did more than just improve the user interface, a mod that doubled the settlement limit for everyone in the game. I wanted to test this out and see if it improved the gameplay, even though I knew that it would make things a bit easier since the AI never seems to expand anywhere near the settlement cap. My third settlement of Canned Fish went to the east of Riverview next to, well, a fish resource. It was harassed by some hostile units from a nearby independent power and I had to cash-rush a hoplite there to keep it from being captured. Units are very cheap to build or purchase in Civ7 though, honestly too cheap since they start cluttering up the map quite badly as the gameplay continues, and I was too busy using my capital's build queue on more settlers for the moment. The units that I did train went off to the west where they cleared that hostile IP (Longchen) which allowed me to place my fourth settlement along the northwest coast. By Turn 50, I had collected enough gold to upgrade Riverview into a city and I was searching around for where my next settlement would be planted:
Even though huge stretches of the map remained unsettled, conflicts started breaking out between the AI civs at this point. First Isabella declared war on Xerxes, perhaps because she was already getting cramped on territory along the eastern coast. This only made her situation worse though as she was unable to expand while the war was raging and even lost her second city to Xerxes to drop her down to solely the capital remaining. Then Franklin declared war on me a few turns later, an entirely predictable development due to how badly our relations had deteriorated. I had my lone army commander and a few slingers situated at Riverview where I correctly predicted Franklin's units would cross the sea for an amphibious invasion. I spent the next few turns squeezing out some additional unit builds from my capital and Riverview which had no trouble pushing back the interlopers. The AI builds lots and lots of units in Civ7 and gets that enormous +8 combat bonus on Deity difficulty... but it has no clue what to do with them. While the AI can defend effectively due to sheer weight of numbers, often stacking a unit on every single tile in a true Carpet of Doom phenomenon, it can't manuever them in any way and therefore can't seriously threaten the player. Things were under control enough that I was able to pack most of my units into the army commander and then go save a Cultural city state that I had befriended off to the south which Franklin had also been attacking. I never could have done that if my territory had been in real danger.
And speaking of AI military incompetence, Franklin also managed to get this settlement captured and then razed by the units from another city state that I had befriended. I don't mean I used influence to take over those units and capture Mediolanum, he lost the settlement purely to the city state itself. 
Maybe I should stop making fun of the Civ4 AI leaders when we do our AI Survivor games, they're infinitely more competent when juiced up with Deity bonuses. Eventually Franklin signed a white peace and I was able to escape this silly conflict.
I wasn't doing anything particularly flashy or interesting during these turns, only continuing to toss more influence at independent powers and to settle the remaining open spaces on the map. My fifth settlement was placed in a rocky location immediately northwest of Isabella's capital that I never should have been able to claim. We named it Greedville and this aggressive settlement caused a downwards turn in our relationship. Maybe you should have settled first-ring spots around your capital instead of starting new wars, Izzy! My sixth settlement went on the offshore island to the northeast which had been absolutely swarming with barbarian units from a hostile IP; I had to wait to pacify them via the befriending quest before it was safe to land. That left room for a few fishing towns along the northern coast and then the deep south beyond the territory of Xerxes and Franklin. It was going to take more than a dozen turns to walk and sail down there but the AI continued to ignore the land so why not?
This process was underway by Turn 90 with the establishment of a settlement we named Amundsen-Scott in the polar south. All three of the AI leaders had continued fighting wars against one another during these intervening turns and that was allowing me to race past them. I was already leading in the expansion race and had multiple additional settlers en route to their destinations. My culture output already exceeded everyone else while my gold/turn and science income were both highly competitive. Again, this was Deity difficulty, the hardest difficulty level that the game offers - shouldn't things be a little bit more challenging than this? I was also nearly done befriending every independent power on the map which would only snowball me further ahead. The gameplay was already reverting to the familiar rhythm of past Civ7 games: settle the map, buy up all the city states, pick any victory condition desired from there.
I kept expecting another war declaration from Franklin but it never came throughout the remainder of the Ancient era. He was spending a lot of time fighting against Xerxes and did manage to take one city off the Persian leader, which was enough to cement Franklin as the top AI leader on the continent despite losing that settlement to the barbarians earlier. I took advantage of the modded increase to the settlement limit to add two fishing towns in the north and then three more settlements in the far south:
Poor Isabella was trying to find a spot for her settler down here and there was simply nothing available. You snooze, you loose. I would eventually convert Amundsen-Scott and Plains Deer into cities while leaving Land's End on the extreme eastern edge of the continent as a fishing town. There were three independent powers down here in the south and naturally I allied with all of them too. There was just barely not enough room for a city between Divodurum and Tiwanaku, though of course I would have established my own settlement there to plug the gap if it had been possible. The passage of these additional 25 turns also had me leading in nearly every category as compared with the AI leaders; I was amused at the extent of the cheating clearly taking place with Isabella and her two cities. I'm supposed to believe that she's making 66 beakers/turn on two cities when restricted to Ancient era technology? Yeah, right.
With the first era approaching its conclusion, I spotted that Franklin had somehow gotten control of the former independent power of Retenu. I think that he picked this up in a peace deal ending one of his various wars against Xerxes (with the city going from independent status to Isabella to Xerxes and now to Franklin), which had the potential to be a real pain in my side due to its location. Retenu bordered three of my settlements while being isolated from the rest of Franklin's core territory. This made it a juicy plum ripe for plucking and I launched my own limited war on Turn 120 with the intention of grabbing this single target:
Retenu was indefensible and quickly fell to my attacking Greek forces. What I hadn't anticipated, however, was the fact that Franklin had an alliance together with Isabella. This brought her into the conflict against me as well, and while I wasn't worried about Izzy's two-settlement empire posing much of a threat, it did remove any chance of friendship with the eastern leader. I went ahead and formally signed an alliance with Xerxes as a result, with the pair of us forging a partnership based on the mutual dislike of our neighbors. Franklin refused to sign peace for the remainder of the era but the ending was close enough at this point that it didn't have much of an effect, aside from some additional unhappiness due to him spending influence on war support. On that note, there's now a new notice when an era is about to finish:
This was added in one of the patches and it's a definite improvement over the prior system. Instead of the era abruptly ending as soon as that clock hits 100%, the player instead gets a 10 turn notification that counts down over the following turns. It's still unclear what triggers the countdown to commence (it seems to start right around the 90% mark) but having a clear finishing date is a real godsend. It still doesn't make the whole concept of era transitions any better though, and on this playthrough I found myself once again feeling bored to tears during the concluding turns. There's simply nothing to do: any new buildings will go obsolete immediately at the start of the next era so what's the point? Civ7 has somehow managed to take the uninteresting endgame turns of the prior games in the series and repeat them three times over - great job, developers! I actually trained half a dozen scouts during these turns and moved them to the coastlines in anticipation of using them as overseas explorers in the next age. At least the patches have also changed things so that your units no longer teleport or get deleted as part of the era transitions; I have no clue what the developers were thinking with that mechanic in the original release version.
Here was the overview screenshot on the final turn of the Ancient era. My yields were being depressed a good bit as a result of being two settlements over the limit (even with my modded increase to the cap) and having negative war support in my ongoing conflict with Franklin. Even so, I was comfortably outpacing the other AI leaders who were simply failing at the basic task of expanding across the map. I nearly had as many settlements as the other three AI leaders combined - on Deity difficulty! - despite having played a mostly peaceful game thus far. These idiots simply do not execute the most basic aspects of building their empires and rely on cheats to remain at all competitive. As for the increased settlement limit, it seemed to be working well thus far and made the game noticeably more fun to play. With the default settlement cap, I wouldn't have had enough happiness to settle all of this territory despite clearly having the production and military to do so. The settlement limit is an artificial gameplay restriction that serves no purpose other than, again, covering up for the dismal state of the AI's performance. The modern Civilization games keep wanting to put mechanics in place that don't let the player build an empire in their empire-building games - I really don't think that they understand their own genre.
I hit all of the scoring goals for the Ancient era except for the wonder category where I only reached the tier 1 goal by building a pair of wonders. This is pretty common for me in Civ7 as I don't value the Cultural category whereas the other three scoring goals all reward the player for doing things that they would be doing anyway (expand, research techs, collect resources, etc.) I actually slotted 30 resources in all, which I think is the best proxy category for overall empire strength in the Ancient era. None of the AI civs could do better than 13 resources connected; they are just so, so bad at the most basic aspects of city development. They can collect the codices because they cheat at science and they do well at building wonders; the other two categories are real struggles for them however.
For the Exploration age, I chose Spain as my civ largely because I had never tried them previously. Spain feels like a middle-of-the-road civ choice with an ability that makes it cheaper to convert towns into cities and then the pictured unique district that provides gold and culture. The Plaza is extremely annoying because it can only be placed on the "homelands" continent and not overseas; that's exactly what I want for my civ's unique stuff, an inability to construct my unique district in half of my cities. Spain does have one unique policy named Cerro Rico (+2 gold for each resource) which is really strong and helps make them a roughly average pick for the second era. As I've mentioned a bunch of times, the choice of leader and civ often doesn't seem to matter much in Civ7 as everything kind of feels the same regardless. Similarly, I took the only two legacy bonuses that matter (Fealty for +2 settlement limit and the Silk Roads Golden Age to stop my cities from turning back into towns) along with a bunch of attribute points. Some of the other golden age bonuses might be interesting to experiment with, but not at the cost of losing all my cities back into towns again, sorry. That particular gameplay mechanic is among the worst ideas anyone has ever had in any Civilization game.
Now I had to do the very tedious process of reconfiguring my whole civ on the other end of the era transition. I've described this as being like taking over a succession game following a really bad player who came in and trashed everything, and the whole thing is never fun to experience in the least. I had to assign all of the attribute points from the legacy scoring, then assign all of the resources again (since the resources change on every era transition), then assign new builds in every city, then pick new techs and civics to research, then go through every unit and give them a movement order or tell them to sleep - argh! The whole thing took well over an hour and I deliberately went through these menial tasks off-stream so that the Livestream viewers didn't have to waste their time on it. Here's what my civ looked like when I was finished:
My yields didn't decrease too badly across the era transition this time; I "only" suffered minor penalties to my science and cultural output. The settlement limit had also happily increased to 18 and I was preparing a wave of settlers to head out overseas and start claiming whatever territory they found over there. My first task was befriending all of the independent powers once again, since all of the IPs from the initial era had disappeared and their friendship status had been wiped out. I had been able to carry over several hundred influence from the Ancient era and used that to start the friendship clock ticking with all four IPs who were present on this starting continent. At least they now are present on Turn 1 instead of popping into existence on Turn 2 as they did in earlier patches. This is still a really dumb system and the IPs would work so much better if they simply remained in place for the whole game like in Civ6.
I started out researching Cartography tech so that my explorers and settlers could cross the ocean tiles. I also used my income to rush-buy three more cogs for a total of four of them on the high seas, all of which began defogging territory as fast as they could travel. This part of the gameplay has always been fun in the Civilization games, with that rush of excitement that comes from the process of discovery. The frustrating part of Civ7 is the way that this gameplay gets railroaded so badly: players CANNOT explore overseas until the second era, and then everyone does so at exactly the same time using exactly the same units. In theory that's more balanced than in past Civ games, but it's also tedious and repetitive and removes most of the fun factor from the whole process. It is literally impossible in this game to research ocean-going technology faster than everyone else and go settle untouched wilderness overseas because the gameplay rules it out.
My plan was to push westward from my core territory in force since that was where my oldest and strongest cities were located. Unfortunately this turned out to be a particularly poor part of the map, as the western always-present island chain was comprised mostly of single-tile islands with nothing but seafood resources present. The only island of any size had a Cultural IP present which wasn't something that I wanted to attack and clear out room to settle. I would end up grabbing one of those islands for strategic reasons, to have a place to cash-rush units if necessary, and otherwise continued pushing further west where I met the two "distant lands" AI leaders. Amina and Trung Trac were over there with civ borders that were way too similar in coloring. Both of them had their own core territories further to the west beyond the unrealistic vertical island chain and I wouldn't end up getting much of anything in this part of the world.
Fortunately the eastern island chain was much richer in resources while also being more isolated from the two AI leaders on the other continent. The settlers that I pushed in that direction soon found some lovely islands full of treasure fleet resources that I snapped up. The logistics of these islands were far, far away from my core territory but I had a massive bank account and could cash-rush more settlers in each new settlement to keep the eastern expansion push rolling along. I was even buying granaries and fishing quays in the new settlements to boost them to size 5 so that I could then rush more settlers. Meanwhile, at home I was busy building the Exploration age infrastructure in my cities as I essentially constructed the exact same buildings from the Ancient era all over again with slightly higher yields. I also founded my religion (everyone gets exactly one!) and took the belief that gives relics for converting enemy capital cities. This made it simple to convert the five AI capitals for 10 total relics, after which I could largely ignore religion because it wasn't worth fighting against the endless missionary spam from the AI leaders.
Then Xerxes threw me a bit of a curveball by declaring war against Isabella on Turn 17. I wasn't particularly interested in fighting a war given how my attention was on overseas colonization, however my alliance compelled me to join or sacrifice Xerxes as a friend so it was back to war again for me. I was initially concerned with Isabella sending her ships to sink my settlers making the perilous overseas journey to the eastern islands. This forced me to cash-rush some more cogs out of Greedville and the offscreen town of Nuuk on the northern island. Izzy also walked a handful of units across the border at Greedville but there was zero danger there as I already had units prepared to meet an attack and cut them apart with ease. Within a few turns, the front was stable and any threat had long since passed.
Over the following turns, the city state alliances that I had initiated at the start of the era bore fruit and I began reaping the benefits of their friendship. Since so many of the city state benefits operate on a percentage basis, I was gaining multiplicative bonuses from each new alliance as the "gain 5% more gold from each city state friendship" stuff kicked in. This began to surge my civ far out in front of the AI leaders, especially in the realm of gold/turn income where Spain's own unique features provided additional gold generation. I topped 700 gold/turn by Turn 30 and the numbers only kept climbing from there, making it a trivial task to project military power wherever I wanted. Cogs and then their upgraded tier 2 version carracks could be bought anywhere on the map for less than 200 gold apiece - how could any opponent ever threaten me? In fact, with Xerxes capturing Isabella's inland city to leave her with only her original capital, I saw an opportunity to take it for myself:
My carrack swarm ruled the waters to the east of Wasset, boosted by a fleet commander and enough stacked bonuses to offset the Deity advantages. I had earlier taken the "+1 combat strength on naval units for each city state alliance" benefit for lack of anything better, something that was unexpectedly coming in handy now. I also had 5 niter resources for +5 strength and then a further +8 combat strength from the presence of the nearby fleet commmander (Order and Shelling), plus a final +3 combat strength from supporting an endeavor with Trung Trac. This was enough for a total bonus of +21 strength which easily swamped the Deity +8 bonus under which Isabella was operating. She had absolutely no chance, not least because I had also taken the fleet commander promotion that gives ships +1 range and therefore all of my carracks were able to hit targets as far as three tiles inland. I blasted apart the defenses at Wasset and captured all of the fortified districts (with some melee units disembarking after the ships had done all the real work) to eliminate Isabella on the pictured Turn 36. That was one less opponent to worry about.
I stopped the Livestream here after capturing Izzy's final city and it's a good place to pause the report as well. I'll cover the remainder of this game on the next page.
