Civilization 7’s Latest Patch Grants You a Blissful Two Seconds by Enabling Instant Unit Movement

Come with me into the sexy world of UI. Chunky 4X strategy game Civilization VII is getting an update today that will let you move units from one hexagonal space to another much more snappily than before. The patch also adds the tallest mountain on earth to the game, but I know what Civ fans really want, and it’s not Everest. It’s a tickbox in the options that removes the animation of your little dudes sprinting across the map, saving you entire seconds of precious existence.

“This is now an optional setting you can toggle on in the game’s menus and it’ll make it so that those units will move to their destination immediately,” says creative director Ed Beach in the above update video, which highlights the changes in today’s update to version 1.1.1.

There are a spread of other tweaks, many of which will remind players of small-yet-useful features in previous entry Civ VI. The world generation now lets you tweak the rules for your “start position”, settlements and commanders can now be renamed, and a quick “restart” button in the pause menu will let you wipe everything and regenerate the map while keeping your chosen leader and civilisation. Useful for scummers who want to cycle through maps looking for a good start.

There’s other stuff. You’ll now get a notification warning when a distant city comes under attack (how did this not exist before?) and when your game reaches the modern age it won’t progress as quickly as it used to. Eliminating other players won’t increase your progress through the age, for example, and the costs of tech and civic advancements during this age will now be 25% more expensive. Basically, developers Firaxis are looking to slow down this part of the game.

None of these changes are revolutionary, but to quote the British megacorporation that sells me constantly shrinking groceries: every little helps. Players of Civ VII have been complaining about the game’s general lack of polish at launch when compared to previous instalments. The user interface has been a particular source of frustration, with our own Civ VII review complained about how confusing it was even to perform a simple attacking move.

The UI gives you no interaction as to why you’re failing. In my early user experience, I actually Googled “how do I attack in Civ 7?”. No help there. Eventually I figured it out. I can’t click on a unit to attack. I can’t click on a city to attack. I have to… click anywhere else to attack… This is just braindead UI/UX design.

It has been patched a number of times since release (today marks the fifth update) with Firaxis seemingly making slow but steady progress through the long list of micro-grumbles from players. They’re also doing a developer livestream today at 5pm GMT on the Civ YouTube channel to talk over the changes in this latest one, and maybe talk about future plans. But we already know some of those plans from a roadmap post on Steam, including the ability to auto-explore, some new resource types, improvements to AI, and the ability to queue your research projects. Modding tools are also planned somewhere down the line, although it’s worth pointing out that modders are already on the case.