In popular imagination, Sid Meier's Civilization is one of those timeless series that doesn't really change, but anyone having actually gone through several of its iterations will be able to give you many examples of quite significant, bold changes throughout the years. These have not always been popular, and you'll find groups of fans that will die on the hill of their favorite entry being the best one – and they'll be able to make compelling arguments for it – but so can the other group. And the next one.

Civilization has always evolved and there's been aspects to love in every one of its entries. Having put a lot of time into Sid Meier's Civilization 7 over the past month, I have not a single doubt that things will turn out the same way they always do.

I'm sure anyone even remotely interested in Civilization will know about the ways the game has been changed for the seventh iteration. There is a strict separation into three phases, called the Antiquity Age, Exploration Age, and Modern Age. Each of these Ages comes with slight changes to the overall mechanics and, crucially, with the ability to switch your civilization.

Your leader, who is now independent from civilizations, has access to a skill tree that you can fill out over the Ages — think Crusader Kings 3. At the end of an Age, a global crisis affects every civilization, bringing even dominant empires to the brink of ruin if it's not dealt with well. This helps form the narrative basis for the soft reset that happens with each Age Transition.

Although your empire will keep all of its settlements and Commanders – a new unit type that can be level up and used to move an entire stack of units easily – during an Age Transition, a part of your army gets deleted. Any Settlers or other civilian units currently on the map, too, will disappear. Although you don't lose improvements or buildings, some structures from the earlier Age will lose their adjacency bonuses and yields, having fallen out of use during the time skip.

My very first Age Transition felt jarring. I was still getting into the groove and hadn't really thought about the next Age at all until it was too late. My Settler, sent out to establish a coastal settlement in order to get ready for the discovery of the Distant Lands, got Thanos'd and my mighty Legions were reduced in number. My wonderful Cities had their status reduced to Towns, the new type of support settlement designed to reduce micromanagement. It was an intrusion, an interruption — it's supposed to be. But as it always is the case, you learn and adapt and start to enjoy playing around the concept. You start thinking of ways to set up for the next Age, perhaps establishing a base on an island off the continent that will become an important hub in the next phase, though it won't do much for you immediately.

Ages end when the Age Progress reaches 100%. This happens automatically with time, but is accelerated by civilizations completing milestones on one of four Legacy Paths every Age has. Divided into Military (though I'd say 'Expansionist' would be a better description, since war is an optional tool to progress through it), Culture, Science, and Economy, the Legacy Paths provide structure to a playthrough, shaping your empire in a way as to help you grab the corresponding Victory Type in the final Age. Instead of settling, fighting, and researching without much of a goal like in previous games, you can treat these Legacy Paths as missions to fulfill.

That may sound restrictive, but that's not the case. If you aimed for a domination victory in earlier Civilizations, you painted the map anyway, right? If you aimed to win the space race, then going all in on Science was the plan right from the start. That freedom was an illusion of choice. Legacy Paths diversify your objectives and make them more concrete.

Take the Science Legacy Path throughout the Ages as an example: In Antiquity it's all about collecting and displaying a Great Work type called Codices. In Exploration, the goal is to have Specialists in your Cities and create tiles with massive yields. In the Modern Age you finally get to the space race you know and love, which is all about researching tech and completing City Projects. Each goal builds on the other, ensuring that by the time you reach the Modern Age, your empire will be well equipped to clinch that win. It's quite a nice piece of design.

But you don't have to just go for one Legacy Path. You still have the freedom of working on all of them at the same time. There are in fact great synergies between some of them. In Exploration, for instance, gaining footholds in the Distant Lands for the Military Legacy greatly assists in the Economic Legacy for this Age, namely exploiting rare Treasure Resources and sending them home via Treasure Fleets. Both Paths go hand in hand.

These objectives haven't hurt replayability for me yet, but it's certainly a concern — especially for the Exploration Age, in which three of the four Legacy Paths heavily push you towards engaging with the Distant Lands, the New World becoming accessible at its start. Firaxis is aware of this, though, and promised that special mechanics for leaders and civilizations (Mongolia is a good example for this from the base game) will provide more flexibility in this regard.

Completing these Legacy Paths shapes your empire and earns you benefits for the rest of the game in the form of Attribute Points for your leader and perhaps even a Golden Age bonuses — likewise, completely ignoring a Legacy Path unlocks its Dark Age Legacy, which can be a fun game-changer.

The race for points, the sometimes abrupt ends to these Ages, the crises — it does all feel a bit more 'gamey' than in previous iterations. But that's not a bad thing. Civilization has always been something of a digital boardgame, after all, and let me tell you, clinching two or three milestones at the end of an Age when all your efforts and plans bear fruit is a great feeling. The system can create a lot of tension and engagement and it can do so several times during a match, which is very enjoyable. This whole formula is designed to improve the pacing of the game and it works.

Another fun aspect of the new system is the fact that civilizations are at their full power level for the entire Age. Rome's mighty Legions stick around for all of Antiquity, giving them a longer time window to do work for you, while Spain's Tercios are available throughout Exploration instead of just a short window between discovering gunpowder and rifling.

Commanders greatly ease army maneuvers and make campaigns feel more dynamic. They are very much an investment you want to keep safe, as they gather XP throughout a game — all the more unfortunate that the AI is somewhat prone to sacrificing theirs on the frontlines. Adding the arrival of navigable rivers and the fact that taking settlements now requires occupying all of their Fortified Districts into the mix, combat has gained a lot of substance: I'll never forget sending my full fleet of Dreadnoughts along a navigable river and into a lake in the enemy's heartland, leaving behind a trail destruction from raiding all the adjacent tiles and then supporting the assault of my main army. This emphasis on combined arms rewards a balanced approach to your army and navy — and airforce, eventually. Planes are great for sniping Commanders, for instance.

There are a few negatives to mention here. The AI is rarely challenging my supremacy over the waves, which is especially disappointing in the Exploration Age, as it'd be great if the opponents would contest my Treasure Fleet convoys. Readability in combat is another concern. Units have very small HP bars and the gorgeous visuals of the game make it difficult to spot the number of models left in a unit at a glance.

This is one of several gripes I have with the game's user interface and experience. Firaxis already touched up the minimap a bit, making it so that it shows civilizations' borders, and added more information to Town screens — but there's more to be tackled. There is a lack of feedback when executing diplomatic actions, converting Towns to Cities, or repairing damaged tiles in Towns. Starting a trade route feels a bit unintuitive due to requiring the use of the Merchant's ability from the unit card as opposed to an action on the trade route tab, which dominates the screen.

More information on a few mechanics would be appreciated as well. When specializing Towns, for example, I'd love the game to tell me the exact yield changes this would cause for my empire before I make my decision, since that's going to be locked in for the rest of the Age. Likewise, the game doesn't provide you with the full information on what civilizations can do while you pick them — having a short overview of their unique Civics (think Focus Trees from Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis) would be good. The map generation for Continents worlds is a bit too blocky and predictable, though Archipelago and Fractal have given me consistently great maps.

There are almost too many mechanics to go over in detail thanks to the division into Ages. What they all have in common is that they work and form a very robust overall construct, although they do all have room for improvement and more depth when looked at individually. Religion – again – is the most awkward system. Part of the Exploration Age, it pops up without any connection to the pantheon your civilization had in the previous Age, which I think goes somewhat against the "history comes in layers" design pillar, and is only there to generate some Culture Legacy Path Points for you, before vanishing in the Modern Age.

Influence and Happiness becoming resources gained from yields as well as other sources has worked out really well, on the other hand. The fact that Influence can be used in diplomacy, for City-State actions, or to generate war support for yourself makes it quite valuable. Happiness, too, can make or break an empire. There is a crisis type that saps away Happiness, potentially making your settlements revolt against you — if you get one or two wars declared against you and you don't have any Influence to stave off war weariness, you'll be in trouble.

The final aspect I want to touch on is storytelling. Historically, Civilization's story has always been created by the player. In Civilization 7, this is still very much the case. In fact, there are conditions to unlock civilizations for your current playthrough that really play into that. Settling a few islands in the Antiquity Age might unlock Hawai'i during the Exploration Age. Having three pastures with horses unlocks Mongolia. Each of these unlocks has a historical background, may figure into your strategy, and comes with a small narrative text block helping you put together this storyline for your people in your head.

Naturally, the choice between min-maxing and going with the flow is up to the player. For those hesitant about the whole civ-switching mechanic, these unlocks may actually be the saving grace, because they provide an explanation for why the switch may happen.

But there's more to it than that: Civilization 7 features a contextual narrative event system that'll throw stories and decisions at you based on what's happening in the game. When completing a camp to hunt elephants while playing as Khmer, the game may tell you that a majestic white elephant has been found among the herd and you can decide whether to make it stay at court or use it as a mount in war, the decision resulting in different bonuses. These chains can be quite long and complex, depending on several trigger factors, so sometimes you only see basic ones for an entire playthrough, making the system seem a bit less immersive and interesting than it actually is.

Civilization 7 will cause friction. It will force longtime players to come out of their comfort zone. I found that stepping outside of mine and engaging with the game's new formula open mindedly was a great decision, because for all the changes it makes, Civilization 7 is still Civilization — you still build an empire, you still strive for domination, but there are new rules. And, like all the previous entries, this one has plenty of room for improvement in the future.

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