Hey Civ fans! With just two weeks left until the February 11 launch of Civilization VII, we have our final pre-launch Dev Diary covering a fitting topic: Victories! Creative Director Ed Beach will be sharing the details on how each of the game's Victories work, and also provide a view into what we have planned post-launch. Loving the Dev Diaries and don't want them to stop? Worry not, as we have plans for a few more topics to dive into! Also - in case you missed it, we recently announced the Civ World Summit - a live Civ VII multiplayer showdown between five prominent members of the community! It's happening on February 8 at 5:00 PM CET / 8:00 PM PT / 11:00 AM ET; you can learn more here. Without further ado, here's Ed on Victories and our plans for post-launch content!

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Hello once again, Civ fans! My name is Ed Beach, Creative Director for Sid Meier's Civilization VII at Firaxis Games. I'm excited to share with you our final Developer Diary before Civ VII launches: Victories. My goal is to provide you with an overview of why we added end-of-campaign Victories to Civilization VII and explain how each of the four Victories are achieved. Since it's so close to the launch of our game, I also have two other topics I'm tacking onto this diary: Tips for Your First Game, and what the Civ community can expect to see from us Post-Launch.

Victories

We've already explained that there are four Legacy Paths in each Age that establish your empire's greatness. So why do we need to add something on top of that, namely these Victories? Well, achieving milestones along a Legacy Path does earn you Legacy Points, a useful metric with which to measure your progress against your opponents. But our design team never felt like a game of Civ should only be about scoring points. For 30 years, players have won their Civilization games with a dramatic moment such as capturing a capital or launching a rocket into space. We want Civ VII players to also feel like they have completed something truly epic – an achievement that establishes your complete dominance at the end of an extensive three-Age campaign. And hence we added Victories.

How Victories work in Civilization VII

So how do Victories work? In the first two Ages, completing all three milestones along a Legacy Path earns you a Golden Age Legacy in the Age that follows: a powerful bonus toward Culture, Science, Economics, or Military. But in the final, Modern Age of our game, completing one of the Legacy Paths unlocks a Victory. As detailed below, each of these Victories typically requires about 20 turns of activity to complete, but if you have earned many Legacy Points across the three Ages in this area of the game, your progress is enhanced. You can work on more than one Victory at a time, and when both you and your opponents are racing to finish these off, the action can get very tense. Whoever completes any single Victory first is the winner of this Civilization VII campaign!

Cultural Victory: World's Fair

Reaching the end of the Modern Cultural Legacy Path unlocks the World's Fair Wonder. Build this in any City of your empire to complete this Victory.

Culture Legacy Points speed up construction of the World's Fair. This makes sense – your people's accomplishments over all of history make it easy to assemble an amazing World's Fair collection that all the world wants to come and see!

Economic Victory: World Bank

Reaching the end of the Modern Economic Legacy Path grants a player a Great Banker in their Capital. This Unit takes just a single turn to fly between Capital cities. Once in a Capital, the Great Banker can be activated to establish a World Bank Office. As soon as you have such an office in every Capital, you complete this Victory.

Economic Legacy Points reduce the amount of Gold and Influence that needs to be spent to establish each World Bank Office. If your empire has a strong reputation as an economic powerhouse, the other world leaders naturally fall in line to let you lead the modern world's financial community.

Military Victory: Operation Ivy

Reaching the end of the Modern Military Legacy Path unlocks the Manhattan Project Wonder. Building this in any City of your empire grants you one nuclear weapon immediately, allows you to run a project to construct additional nuclear weapons, and unlocks the ability to start work on an even more devastating technology: Operation Ivy, the world's first hydrogen bomb. Completing Operation Ivy finishes this Victory.

Military Legacy Points speed up construction of both the Manhattan Project and Operation Ivy. Your long tradition of military and industrial achievements pay off now by accelerating your progress in the all-important race for an entirely new class of weaponry.

Scientific Victory: First Staffed Space Flight

Reaching the end of the Modern Science Legacy Path unlocks the Staffed Space Flight Project. Complete this project in any City with a Launch Pad to complete this Victory.

Science Legacy Points speed up construction of the Staffed Space Flight Project. Getting humans into space is a tricky endeavor; an empire with a strong track-record of scientific breakthroughs can surely be mission-ready to launch into space before their competition.

Tips for Your First Game of Civ VII

Civilization VII is a BIG game, with many new systems and mechanics that differentiate it from earlier games in our series. There's a lot to learn, so we felt that it was important that we provide some suggestions to ensure everyone has a successful first experience.

Map Size and Type*

We know that many veteran Civ players love to play on the largest map size and see the maximum number of empires battle it out. However, there's a very deliberate reason that we chose Small as the default map size. With three other empires on your home continent, and a few more to discover later in the game, Small Maps make for a very comfortable experience while you are learning the ins and outs of Civ VII. We especially recommend this map size as you get your feet wet with our new Diplomacy system. Tracking your relationship and ongoing diplomatic activities with a manageable number of opponents makes it way easier to get the hang of how you want to spend and manage your Diplomatic Influence.

We also recommend sticking with Continents Plus for your Map Type selection. The extra islands just off-shore help ease you into the ocean exploration – a key element of the Exploration Age, the second chapter of our game.

Tutorial and Advisors

When you launch into your first game of Civilization VII, we'll turn the Tutorial on for you. The Tutorial is designed to provide tips and explanations exactly when you first encounter something new. Fans experienced with earlier Civ titles may scoff at the idea of playing with the Tutorial on, but with so many of our game systems having received upgrades and revisions, we really do recommend sticking with the Tutorial for your first full campaign through our three Ages. Keep in mind that the game has four different Advisors, and you can control which ones are actively leading you through a series of quests to teach you their portion of the game. If it's too much to take in all at once, we suggest listening to only a single Advisor at a time.

Eventually you'll have mastered enough systems to turn the Tutorial off. But when you do, strongly consider switching to the setting Only Warnings. This setting allows these same Advisors to jump in and warn you if your empire's progress is about to undergo a major setback. Even our internal team at Firaxis that knows this game so well plays with these warnings enabled!

Post-Launch

February 11, the worldwide launch of Civilization VII, is just around the corner. In one sense, that's the end of a long road to get our game ready for all our gaming platforms. But in a much larger sense, it is really a beginning. February 11 is the start of Civilization VII's journey with our amazing community of fans. So what do we have planned as we embark on this venture together?

The Road Ahead

Let's start by taking a look at a graphic that shows our path forward through the first six months of Civilization VII. During this time we'll be updating our game regularly, with the sorts of updates we provide broken into three categories:

• Content Collections: Paid content (such as Crossroads of the World**) where we release new leaders, civs, and Wonders over the course of a few months.
• Free Updates: Improvements elevating our game in a wide variety of areas, available for free to all players.
• Events & Challenges: Month-long activities available to all players that allow you to experiment with new gameplay ideas, similar to those that the Civ VI community enjoyed throughout 2024.

Each of these updates is described further in the sections below.

Content Collections

The main piece of paid content you can engage with and choose to purchase separately are called "Collections." As the name implies, these bundles are thematic groupings of new civilizations, leaders, Wonders, and other small odds and ends. The first of these, the Crossroads of the World Collection, begins to deploy in March 2025, fast on the heels of launch, to ensure we're bringing you more ways to play as quickly as we can. The Crossroads of the World Collection will be released in two content drops during March 2025. The initial drop includes long-standing favorite civs Carthage and Great Britain, along with Ada Lovelace, a truly novel Civ leader who has a way of mastering a game world unlike any other. Then, just three weeks later, the second half of that collection drops will be released with even more content, including the leader Simón Bolívar, plus the civilizations Bulgaria and Nepal that have never appeared in the franchise previously.

Free Updates: Step 1 - Collecting Feedback

First of all, we're excited to hear from you, our players, once you've had a chance to dive into Civilization VII. We'll be closely monitoring and listening to your feedback, and our goal is to share with you when and how we intend to make ongoing improvements to the gameplay experience over time. What do you like about this latest Civilization title? What could be improved? Where are you confused, and where do we need to elevate our user interface, provide better tutorialization, or add clarity to how things are presented? Also, what ideas do you have to make the Civ VII experience more fun?

Our games are always improved significantly when we listen closely to fan input. We have no doubt our amazing community will come up with creative and ingenious ideas this time too. We can't wait to hear your thoughts and suggestions!

Free Updates: Step 2 - Updating the Core Game 

So how does this feedback directly translate into improvement in the game? What kind of updates can Civilization VII players expect to see?

The first set of updates we'll be providing are those that directly target the game as it currently stands. There will be some bugs to fix, plenty of balance changes to make, and we know there are spots in the gameplay and user interface that can be enhanced with any number of quality-of-life improvements. You'll see regular updates from us in all of these areas.

We also have a number of updates planned to round out some features that didn't quite make it in for our initial launch. Our development team is a creative bunch that has a seemingly endless list of ideas, but there are a few that have bubbled up to the top that I want to mention as priorities for the team:

• Adding Teams to multiplayer games so we can let you play cooperatively
• Expanding to 8 players for multiplayer in all Ages through refinements to our Distant Land 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
• Adding in hotseat multiplayer

There's no exact date for these features at the moment, but we already have developers assigned to get them out to you as soon as we can.

Events

Besides our ideas for features we know you'll like, we have ideas that are a bit more experimental. Things that we'd love to get your feedback to see if they might make sense in a future update. We also have an extensive list of activities that are simply fun ways to shake up your Civ VII gameplay. It's for these reasons that you will see Events offered in our game - starting soon! These offerings give you the choice to opt in and try one of these new experiences. We'll want to hear what you think and find out whether we might have hit on something you'd like to see us add to the core Civ VII experience. Also, keep an eye out for a future Dev Diary that will dive in deeper on what you can expect from Events! 

Modding

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention one of the most important ways our games improve after launch – through the tireless work of our community of modders. Civ VII is built on many of the same technologies we shared with modders to allow them to create their amazing content in the past. As 2025 unfolds, we'll be sharing modding tools and tips with these creators so they can get to work bringing their own ideas to life for you, our fans.

So there's a look at the road ahead. It's going to be quite a busy year. We are so looking forward to hearing from all of you very soon!

*Map restrictions apply to gameplay on Nintendo Switch. More info available here.

**Crossroads of the World Collection is included in the Deluxe and Founders Editions of Civilization VII. It is also available for separate purchase (base game required). Contains 6 DLCs, all of which will be available March 2025 (subject to change). Each DLC will be delivered automatically in-game on release. Terms apply.

***Online play and features (including progression bonuses) require an Internet connection and 2K Account (minimum age varies). At launch on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC up to five players supported in the Antiquity & Exploration Ages, and up to eight players supported in the Modern Age. At launch on Nintendo Switch, up to four players are supported in the Antiquity & Exploration Ages, and up to six players supported in the Modern Age in games. Map size restrictions may apply to certain cross-play multiplayer games. More info available here: https://civilization.2k.com/civ-vii/faq/. Console online play on Xbox and PlayStation requires a separate paid subscription. Terms apply.