Civilization VII‘s Road To Recovery Continues With Fourth Big Update

Civilization VII’s next big update has arrived and the 4X strategy game is steadily checking off the boxes on players’ most requested fixes and additions. It hasn’t yet purged the negative vibes around launch (or the game’s underwater user review rating on Steam), but the fourth major update in two months has certainly moved things closer to that tipping point where those on the fence can hop on board and get acquainted with Civ VI’s successor.

“In this update, you’ll find the return of Multiplayer Teams, a rework to how Food and growth scale over time, significant updates to Resources, and more,” the development team at Firaxis announced on the Civ website. Patch 1.2.0’s big ticket items include new resources like clay and mangoes with unique effects and narrative events, randomized Resource generation to change things up more, and rebalanced effects like “making Dyes more potent for Happiness, turning Fish into a Bonus Resource, and introducing Tin as a new Factory Resource that improves your Growth Rate.”

The new update also brings the “Just One More Turn” endless mode for completed games, more generous food yield curves, better map generation for coastlines, improved AI naval strategies, and more. There’s also a bevy of UI fixes, one of the more unfinished-looking parts of Civ VII at launch, including research queuing, better alignment and spacing (“Civilopedia page no longer overlaps with the Religion Belief selection menu”), reduced frequency of Town Specialization Available notifications, and fixes for small but annoying bugs like “The health bar of healthy Units no longer turns red in the Unit Panel after viewing a damaged Unit of the same type during gameplay.”

There’s only one big shortcoming of patch 1.2.0 and it’s that it won’t be available on Switch for a while. The update for Nintendo’s handheld hybrid won’t arrive until Civ VII hits Switch 2 in June. “This extra time allows us to make sure everything will be working as intended for existing Nintendo Switch players, while laying the groundwork for an upgrade path for the future Nintendo Switch 2 release and support for cross-platform DLC ownership,” Firaxis says.

The latest version brings us to the end of the roadmap the team shared earlier this year, which still includes upcoming features like hotseat multiplayer, auto-explore, modding tools, and of course lots and lots of additional UI tweaks. As Civ fans recently pointed out on Reddit, sequels (at least in the modern era) often follow bumpy post-launch trajectories. We’ll see how long it takes for Civ VII to hit its definitive “good now” era, at least in the eyes of many long-time players.