At Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, last month, I sat down in one of a dozen chairs arranged like a makeshift theater to watch Ed Beach -- lead designer of the upcoming Sid Meier's Civilization 7 and creative director for the storied and hugely popular Civilization franchise -- tell us what's new in potentially the most anticipated strategy game right now. But before he got to the meaty changes, he started talking about a gate in London. 

Ludgate, as Beach explained with bird's-eye photos of London through time, was a gate at one end of the original Roman fort city. The gate was rebuilt and used to defend against invaders as the urban area expanded around and beyond the gate until it was finally demolished in 1760. But it lives on today in the road junction Ludgate Circus, even as the metropolis around it is unrecognizable from its origins. That's the point Beach was making: Original points live on in the monuments and ancient buildings poking out of modernity. A city has layers.

It's a vivid metaphor -- think of gothic cathedrals across Europe alongside modern glass towers, or the pyramids of Giza butting up against Cairo's suburbs. The layers stratify time and denote the influences that make up a comprehensive, cosmopolitan civilization. That's the pitch Beach made internally to describe the impact of Civilization 7's biggest change: ages. Now, each long game will be split into three parts that correlate with a different broad era of human expansion, cultural development and technological evolution. These ages are called Antiquity, Exploration and Modern. 

Splitting a play session into ages does a few things. Most importantly, players can choose a different civilization at the dawn of a new age. In fact, they have to: Civilizations are now locked into the age in which they're relevant. You can even pick seemingly disparate cultures to evolve into. As an example, Beach explained that one could pick Egypt in Antiquity and then move on to Mongolia if they chose, so long as they met the prerequisite -- either research into horse technology or having Mongolia unlocked by choice of leader. This is partly designed to remedy imbalances in previous games where civilizations, like America, were at a disadvantage because their bonuses kicked in too late in a game (thematically fitting its late arrival in history).

Beach told CNET that if you look at French cities, most started as Roman outposts, and then in the Middle Ages, they were either part of Charlemagne's Frankish empire or the Norman empire. One of those empires took over and advanced things until, in modern times, we finally have a French nation born -- and players are going to see that evolution.

"Now, with our ages system, everyone is playing an empire at the height of their glory," Beach said.

The advantages of splitting your long game into a trilogy

In addition to giving players more choices, instituting ages also resets the playing field to a certain extent at the turn of a new age. In the last few Civilization games, it got too easy to overtake the AI civilizations and steamroll them, so clearing the slate at a new age will shake up a game, Beach said. And since players of Civilization 6 simply weren't finishing long games as they reached a stable, stale state, ages will present new challenges and milestones to play toward.

"The ages system is getting people through the game without hitting those walls that they might have hit before," Beach said. 

Ages last a set number of turns -- for Antiquity, it's 200 -- though they can be accelerated with other progress, like building the wonders of the ancient world. While you'll be capped at a technology level within each age, there are other ways to prepare for the future by researching other civilization development trees. Ages end with a crisis, pressuring players with overlapping challenges until the age finally ends and a new one begins.

"The game stays competitive longer, because there's more chances for strategy pivots or to come from behind," Beach said. 

Leaders get another significant change: They can now be chosen separately from their civilization, so you don't have to pair Hatshepsut with Egypt -- but her bonuses to river exploration fit that nation's strengths. After choosing a leader, the tooltip will show which civilizations synchronize best, but you could choose seemingly suboptimal pairings for some elaborate strategem -- or for fun.

Hands-on with a new Civilization

After the presentation, we got around 30 minutes of hands-on time with Civilization 7, which is too short a time to notice all but the most rudimentary of new things in the game. Some are obvious -- there are no builder units, and city expansions are just constructed over turns. I also ran into a tile of barbarians, which are now independent villages that can be either hostile or neutral. If you invest influence, they could become allies serving as buffer zones against hostile states, and even send gifts.

I also didn't get far enough to experience the other big feature for combat: commanders. Moving armies around in Civ 6 was rough, Beach acknowledged in the briefing, to the point where the tedium of micromanagement was often harder to fight than the enemy. Commanders can be moved to a location, and associated armies will follow. You can even collapse units into the commander's tile for easier movement. The commander gains experience and provides bonuses you choose to the units under them, rather than the units themselves leveling up. There's also a reinforce-from-afar system in which -- so long as you're in friendly territory -- new units will appear in the commander's army after a certain number of turns, so you don't have to manually move each and every one across the map. 

There's also a new way to bargain with other civilizations: diplomacy, where influence is the yield. Diplomacy covers treaties, espionage and other agreements. There are still four paths to victory, but instead of religion and diplomacy, the new path this time around -- in addition to science, culture and military -- is economic. 

As a Civilization newcomer, I didn't catch all the minute ways that Civilization 7 has changed over its predecessors, but shifting toward ages and decoupling civilizations from leaders presents some incredible and novel ways for games to develop. And franchise veterans will likely notice the many ways that Beach and his team have tried to trim away a lot of the micromanagement that wears on players.

"We really feel like we have a game that flows very nicely, that never gives you too much to manage," Beach said, also pointing out that the ages system will make it easier to take the game in bite-sized chunks. "And you're going to see all of history this way in one big sweep, but if you need to divide your time up -- modern players don't necessarily like to play games that take 18 to 20 hours, right? -- it's much more manageable that way as well."

Sid Meier's Civilization 7 comes out on Feb. 11, 2025, for PC, PS5 and PS4, Xbox Series X and S, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. At the moment, iOS is not listed among the release platforms, and 2K Games had nothing to share on that at this time.