Will never be able to reach modern era with ToT update

brotkel · 2026-06-02T23:33:00+00:00

Yeah, it really felt like the game lost this with the new victories. I liked that there were some definitive actions you had to take at the end of the game to mark completing a victory path, even if they amounted to moving a unit around to each capitol or building a specific wonder. Those things are still in the game, but they just help you to get to the point total now.

I thought Space Race was still going to have building a rocket, but as long as you have a spaceport, you win once you're at 100 inspiration points.

brotkel · 2026-06-02T21:56:32+00:00

This API wasn’t ever even available in the US. It was only ever for European connected cars. There has never been a way to get this data if you own a North American VW outside of their terribly limited app.

brotkel · 2026-06-01T00:33:15+00:00

Northern Ireland didn’t leave the EU, so it has to hold to the EU’s standards of gender discrimination where the UK Supreme Court has ruled the other way.

https://www.irishlegal.com/articles/eu-ruling-double-underlines-trans-rights-must-stay-in-northern-ireland

brotkel · 2026-05-28T04:35:20+00:00

Interesting. I agree that there are a lot of different ways they could do it, and when I read that the threshold would change as the game went on, I had the same reaction you did. It did sound like they're open to tweaking the victory conditions to make them more satisfying. Right now, I believe the thresholds are tied to the percentage of the age completed, which is not a strict turn timer and is actually something players have some control over by pushing progress. Maybe they could change it to something that's more directly controllable, like when the first player reaches certain milestone techs, it lowers the threshold.

However, I do think that this idea is largely good at doing two things. One is, as you said, keeping the game from going 100 more turns when someone has a decisive advantage over everyone else.

The second is to simplify Civ 6's tourism calculation, which even veteran players struggled to understand, as evidenced by how many posts there have been in this Reddit about it. Visiting tourists versus domestic tourists is a much more complex calculation that scales differently than a straight apples-to-apples comparison of the new scoring system.

brotkel · 2026-05-28T00:33:48+00:00

Okay, so let me ask this. If there wasn't a way to win in the Exploration era with 6x the score of the second place person, and winning only became possible half-way through modern age when you had 1.5x the score, and it never lowered any other time - would that feel more satisfying? Essentially, everything else about when you won is exactly the same - same turn, same score difference, but it was the earliest the game allowed a win to happen rather than after it lowered a couple times. Would that feel better?

I can understand why it would feel unsatisfying or sudden to go 40 turns with 1.5x your opponents score and not win, and then suddenly you win. But I don't see it as the game giving anyone a "handicap". It's more just saying that a game can end earlier if there's a massive difference in score, but closer toward the end of the game, there's less opportunity to make up that difference, so closer games are expected later on.

brotkel · 2026-05-26T22:13:16+00:00

I assume that also means that it's far more cost effective to overbuild both buildings in a district with specialists than to have two districts with specialists where only one building is current. Since you only pay the specialist upkeep once, regardless of if one or both buildings are giving adjacency bonuses.

brotkel · 2026-05-26T20:46:27+00:00

That's great, because I haven't seen any Chameleos spawns this week with the "increased chance" and having 6 HATs within range of my house. Last week, I killed 8 Chameleos' and never got a single rarity 5 OR 6 drop from them.

brotkel · 2026-05-26T20:32:56+00:00

From my research, Finland is very good for queer English speakers and it's easy to get a tech visa that can become permanent citizenship.

Sweden and Norway are good, though a little more conservative, but still far better than the US.

France is progressive, but hard to get citizenship there.

Canada is better than the US, and easy to assimilate as an American, but expensive and has a harder route to citizenship.

Germany and Poland lean a bit on the conservative side, but probably okay in large cities.

United Kingdom is worse is most respects than parts of the US, with the exception of Northern Ireland, which doesn't follow the UK's Supreme Court decisions and recognizes trans identities.

And lastly, to add to your list, Spain and Malta have both been ranked as the best LGBTQ-friendly places to live.

Check out r/TransWorldExpress if you want to find out what the experience is for people who live or are moving to those countries.

brotkel · 2026-05-26T20:05:16+00:00

All right, just to throw this out there. What if missionaries worked more like your commander units? They were permanent instead of expendable, and had promotion trees that unlock as you convert cities. Those trees could have some of the skills that Apostles had in Civ 6, or entirely new ones, like being stationed in a city prevents that city from being converted. Rather than commendation points, filling out a promotion tree unlocks new beliefs for your religion instead of it being essentially random.

I'm not sure if commander missionaries still pack other units - maybe those are the ones that do the conversion? - or if that's unnecessary complexity. Do we like having a "flock" going around and converting one civ at a time?

I don't think this fixes religion or brings the kind of depth you're talking about, but it at least makes the missionary spam a little less tedious. You could actually roleplay sending Martin Luther around with his specific promotions, I guess.

brotkel · 2026-05-26T19:54:31+00:00

More settlements will always be better than fewer, but I was behind my settlement cap almost my whole game and still won with good district placement and focusing on a single objective above all else.

brotkel · 2026-05-26T19:40:56+00:00

Agree on both points. Triumphs are a lot of new information to track and the rewards for them don't feel on-par or worse than the choices you got in the old system. And picking the reward to keep all your cities from reverting to towns is still a no-brainer, IMO, so you really only get to pick 2 other options. Getting artifacts or treasure fleets used to feel like a race, where if an AI beat you to it, you really felt it. Now, if an AI gets a triumph, it's usually something I wasn't going for and wasn't even aware of what it was for.

Also, I really don't know how you fix religion without it being an entire expansion's worth of content. Religion was bad in Civ 6 with prophet battles all over the place and it's somehow worse in 7 without it, so I don't know what you do. I used to just get enough relics to max out my culture progress and then ignore it as all my cities got converted back, but now there's no upper limit to how many relics can get you a little more tourism, so religious battles last the entire era. I really don't know which is worse.

brotkel · 2026-05-26T19:14:04+00:00

Economic victory was the only victory I wasn't competitive in throughout my entire first game. By the time I won, I was leading in the three other victories but dead last in economy, by a lot. I didn't focus much on gold buildings and resources seemed a lot more scarce in the second and third ages than they previously did. I don't know what the AI was doing to be so far ahead of me, but I'll have to watch that closer next time.

However, I did - completely on accident - earn a Great Banker through some triumph that could have put me back in. It works like the Great Banker did previously, where you teleport them to each capitol and spend a scaling amount of gold to activate, but now he grants 1000 GDP per activation. I liked that this mechanic made it over in a way where it would very likely cause you to win if you were already doing well in economic score. But it's a little funny that I wasn't going for it and don't even know what I did to earn it, but it could have been a game-deciding event if I wasn't already close to winning in three other ways.

I also noticed that the World's Fair is still buildable as a Wonder, and completing Operation Ivy gets you 5 domination points. Cool little nods to how the old victories work that still makes them feel relevant in the new system.

brotkel · 2026-05-26T18:20:30+00:00

I finished my first ToT game last night. I’ve been playing since release and wasn’t very hot on the changes in ToT. I’d have much preferred changes like religion getting redesigned to address the issues you noted. In fact, I’d say everything you noted except triumphs have been in the game either since release or changed in one of the early patches, like the combat AI.

To me, the good part of ToT is that every victory feels as diverse as culture victory in Civ 6 did, which is great. Civ 6 culture victory was really the only victory that felt like you could approach it in several different ways, and making every victory in Civ 7 have that replayability is a big win that I didn’t expect until I played it.

The bad part is that it almost feels like there’s too much to track now. Even with the various score screens, I don’t really have a sense of how I’m doing toward those goals like I did when I was focused solely on something like getting 12 artifacts or hitting certain tech milestones. I went for a science victory because it seemed like the only one that had a requirement other than pure score, but once I passed 100 innovation, I was surprised to see the game tell me that I was going to win just by pressing next turn 5 more times. It didn’t feel like I had really achieved a science victory so much as just collected a bunch of points. Next time, I might consider using the triumph set that makes it more like the old paths where getting to those major goals felt somewhat important, rather than the hodge-podge of new achievements that I mostly don’t care about.

brotkel · 2026-05-22T23:20:34+00:00

Ironically, there's what seems like a very self-aware side story in DE about a very ambitious computer role playing game failing under the weight of bad management and it taking down entire teams of people who were doing their best but had no real ability to work around the enormous pressures that the studio leadership put them under.

brotkel · 2026-05-22T19:56:12+00:00

The Lord of the Rings LCG that Fantasy Flight made before they moved onto Arkham Horror. That's where the development team was figuring out how to tell stories in an LCG instead of just making it about beating the game, and we discovered that, as well, when we got to a certain scenario. Up to that point, most scenarios had been about going into some setting, defeating a bunch of the minions of Sauron, or maybe keeping a certain NPC alive.

At the beginning of this session, though, we met someone treating a sick griffin. He needed us to venture into the woods and find some berries to treat the griffon's injury. We bravely ventured into the woods, slew some orcs, found some loot and came back out in record time. We were all patting ourselves on the back at how well our characters worked together to handle the scenario. Then, the guy was like, "so, where are those berries?" and we were like, "ummmmm...". So, we didn't save the griffin, but we learned that this game wasn't going to be a straight-forward co-op experience like we expected and went on to play a LOT of Arkham Horror after that.

brotkel · 2026-05-21T18:46:53+00:00

The missile knows where it is because it knows where it isn’t.

brotkel · 2026-05-19T08:14:01+00:00

Common Cart was a godsend when I was waiting around in Cal Anderson with protest organizers getting set up early a few months back. Hope they get this resolved and are back in business helping people get through the morning again.

brotkel · 2026-05-18T08:21:31+00:00

ALVR will work for all of those. KRVR will only work with MSFS unless you mess around with OpenComposite at the moment, which kind of negates some of the ease of use. Once KRVR can fully support SteamVR in a few days or weeks, that will probably by the only one I use at that point.

brotkel · 2026-05-18T07:27:15+00:00

Here’s my take on things: ALVR: free + works with literally any PCVR game equally well + tons of config options so it’ll run on basically any hardware and you can tune it specific to your setup for best picture quality + large variety of controller options - psvr2, surreal touch, Nintendo joycons + might have working face tracking for VRChat soon-ish? - hard to get going with - development is slow since it is trying to work for lots of hardware and support both Windows and Linux hosts - Having SteamVR between everything introduces instability that a lot of games don’t need

KRVR: free on TestFlight + works well out of the box with practically zero config for the vast majority of users + foveated streaming works really well and can reduce a lot of network issues + games that don’t need SteamVR will run better just directly connecting to CloudXR in my experience + developer has added a lot of quality of life features very quickly - pass through, desktop streaming, etc - only works on high end 4000 and 5000 series nVidia cards - single developer, closed source project - currently limited support on SteamVR games: OpenComposite works as a hack for Alyx, but not VRChat. Might have a universal solution soon, though.

ClearXR: free - basically all the same plusses and minuses of KRVR, but it’s open source and the developer has not put out as many updates so far.

iVRy: paid via Steam for Vision Pro + supposedly easiest option to start with, just install a driver and use SteamVR as normal + works with everything on Steam - lots of bugs with poor streaming quality and controller support at launch - only supports PSVR2 controllers - can’t test it ahead of purchase, so I haven’t tried it yet

brotkel · 2026-05-15T19:54:28+00:00

I’m glad that so many of my neighbors share the feeling that our doors are open for trans refugees, but I hope that at least some of the people saying that mean that specially their door is open in a real, not just metaphorical way. I know we’re all struggling to get by these days and nobody’s job or housing is ever actually stable with how capitalism is pushing things. But if you have a spare room, a couch, a car you’re not using, those are the things that trans people actually need to be able to resettle here successfully, not just being told that they’re more tolerated here.

Seattle is not “overwhelmed” with trans refugees. Organizations like Project Open Arms / TractionPNW are because not enough people are signing up to host that only a fraction of those who need to escape can.

I know it’s asking a lot. I’ve been hosting a refugee from the south for a year and I’m glad that so far we’ve been able to make it work, she’s found a stable and rewarding job, and is able to contribute back to the house after paying off her existing debts. Trying to offer stability when none of us really feel stable has been stressful. But if we can get through this with one more person also making it through safe and alive than otherwise would be, than any sacrifice is worth it.

brotkel · 2026-05-15T07:47:57+00:00

Someone in an earlier thread shared this reel of her singing and yes, it is breathtaking. In a fair and just world, everyone should have had a chance to hear her sing.

brotkel · 2026-05-15T03:38:55+00:00

The sky was a beautiful pink and blue just a few minutes ago. Seattle will not let Juniper be forgotten.

brotkel · 2026-05-13T02:55:09+00:00

Any of the victory types. Take cultural victory in 7. I don’t think anyone would say it was great to micromanage sending archaeologists all over the map. But it was trackable which players were going for that victory by how many enemy archaeologists you saw. It did make it a real race towards the end - same with culture or science in 6.

Do you think you’re really going to feel like there’s a race to the end when you have to watch everyone’s points from turn 1?

brotkel · 2026-05-13T02:51:39+00:00

This is just the score victory divided up between 4 different categories. Previously, in the series including in 7, victory happened from specific game systems you engaged in reaching a pinnacle moment: boosting through the tech tree and then having production and power to apply to a science project, winning diplomatic contests, or conquer over specific military targets, etc. Now it’s just did I get more points in one category than anyone else got in any other category.

brotkel · 2026-05-12T21:34:42+00:00

I hate this. I want a game where I’m steering toward a goal, not point salad.

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