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With Civilization 7‘s new ability to mix-and-match leaders and civs, and all the bonuses available from civics, wonders, and new features like leader attributes, there is a goofy amount of optimizing you can do. While playing a preview build of the game—which isn’t out for a couple more weeks yet—YouTuber Drongo decided to see how far they could push it. It’s safe to say that they pushed it to its limit, because the game stopped working.
You can watch Drongo’s video above. It’s a sponsored video for a new channel called One More Turn, so consider the praise for Civ 7 with that context in mind, but the mechanics of the game-breaking optimization are the interesting thing to me. It was clear to me from my own experiences previewing Civ 7 that you can go wild with bonus stacking if you want to, but I’m really not the theorycrafting type—I just want to build cool wonders so I can admire them, not because I have some big plan in mind.
Drongo is the other kind of player. I’ll leave the full details of this game-breaking build to the video, but the gist is that playing as Confucius with the Khmer civ, Drongo focused all his energy on stacking food and growth bonuses. Just a few of them:
- Confucius grants 25% growth rate in cities
- The Khmer Empire’s unique ability prevents urban districts from removing a tile’s natural yield, meaning you can build up your city without sacrificing food
- The Khmer Baray improvement increases food in all floodplains in a settlement
- The Khmer Chakravarti Civic increases growth rate in the capital
- He selected multiple leader attributes that increase growth and food production
- He made all his towns specialize in farming
By turn 76, Drongo had stacked around 18 bonuses and was producing 263.5 food per turn. For comparison, at turn 87 in a recent game, I was producing a pathetic 59 food per turn. Granted, I had been playing in exactly the opposite manner: focusing all my energy on pointlessly building a really long Great Wall, purely for aesthetic reasons. (I think that makes my leadership style more historically accurate.)
Sadly, Drongo did not get to create the world’s first megalopolis before the invention of mathematics, because Civilization 7 simply couldn’t handle that much food. At turn 98, he noticed that his capital had stopped growing. Upon further inspection, he discovered that Civ 7 was asking for -1112 food to produce a new citizen. It’s not clear why the game invented the concept of anti-food, but it must have something to do with Drongo’s absurd agricultural domination.
Firaxis will probably have fixed that bug by the time Civ 7 releases on February 11. Not that I would ever encounter it anyway, since my citizens won’t have time for surplus food production with all the pointless building projects I plan to demand of them.
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Kurt Indovina
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