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Who made this

Written by Ian, a Civilization player who wanted a guide that explained how the systems work and connect, and how they tie into the history mechanically, rather than just listing what they are. It is a personal project with no advertising and nothing to sell. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Firaxis Games, 2K, Take-Two Interactive, or any other organization.

How it was made

This guide was written with AI assistance.

What that meant in practice: the AI drafted text and generated images, while I specified, directed, researched, argued, corrected, refined, and cut over the course of a few hundred turns across multiple tools. The site is also built with the open-source Docusaurus framework and uses Mermaid for its diagrams. The first public edition took about 80 hours to build.

How it was checked

The guide uses an evidence hierarchy for data: facts observed in the game itself first, official patch notes and developer documentation second, wiki posts third, community consensus last. When a fact rests on a lower tier, it is recorded as such rather than left as settled. When a fact is ambiguous, the guide uses higher-level language to hedge.

Corrections and Feedback

If you find something wrong, please use the feedback form below and include whether you used in-game verification or an alternate means. General suggestions are welcome too. If you like something, I'd like to hear what it is so I can preserve or amplify it.

Open the feedback form

What's changed

A reader-facing record of notable updates, newest first.

20 September 2026

Added the Hall of History Collection: two new leaders, Elizabeth I and George Washington, and three new civilizations, Babylon and Gauls in the Antiquity Age and England in the Exploration Age, each with full leader and civilization cards, new portrait and civilization artwork, and updated roster totals of 38 leaders and 50 civilizations.

19 September 2026

Clarified the Science and military systems: Codices now appear only in Antiquity, with the Innovation they earn retained after the Age ends, while combat guidance now centers on four land classes, the relevant Strength type, and positioning rather than a counter cycle. Commander guidance now covers promotions, reinforcements, rail movement, packing costs, and the units a Commander preserves through an Age transition; settlement and Age-transition planning also now call out the Radial Ruler and visible Syncretism options.
Clarified the choice Allies face when war begins: they can join the fighting, break the alliance, or spend Influence to remain neutral without ending it.
Fixed the close button on a leader card overlay overlapping the attribute chips in the card's banner.
Leader portraits now lift slightly under the pointer instead of drawing a box around themselves, matching how civilization artwork behaves. A keyboard focus ring is still shown when tabbing.

3 September 2026

Corrected the victory-score guidance: GDP accumulates, Dominion tracks what you currently hold and can fall, Tourism mixes standing assets with apparently banked rewards, and Innovation is a fixed race. The Military and Scientific sections now explain the practical consequences, including Dominion values, score defense, and the Projects that actually supply Innovation.
Redesigned the leader cards: the portrait, attribute chips and "How they play" are all visible at once, with no card flip. Clicking the portrait opens the full picture with the leader's life and legacy, its caption, and a link to Wikipedia.
Added an "all" and "any" switch to the attribute filters on the leaders and civilizations pages, so you can match every chip you pick or any one of them.
Fixed leader cards becoming squeezed and hard to read on narrow windows, and stopped an opened leader card from stretching far down the page.

2 September 2026

Expanded the Military path from a conquest checklist into a control-and-holding plan, with Dominion and Domination compared directly, Age-by-Age guidance, a leader and civilization roster, and the Modern Triumphs that matter.
Reworked the Scientific path around its real bottleneck: Production. The guide now maps Innovation sources, explains the Antiquity-to-Modern setup, and organizes the relevant leaders and civilizations by Age.
Reworked the Economic path around compounding GDP, Resource slots, Treasure Convoys, connected Factories, and the Modern Triumphs that accelerate an established trade engine.
Reworked the Cultural path around Tourism collection and defense, with Age-by-Age guidance, a values table, Modern Triumphs, and leader and civilization choices that support the full three-Age plan.

1 September 2026

Reorganized the Religion & Great Works page by Age instead of by system, and added guidance for collecting Modern Artifacts and chasing the five Cultural Triumphs they feed.
Fixed light mode not fully applying on Android phones and tablets when the browser's built-in dark theme forcing was switched on.
Fixed the search icon being invisible in dark mode.

25 August 2026

Restored the textured border on closed civilization cards, which had been sitting inset from the artwork.
Added a "Jump to all leaders" button to the leaders page, so the roster is one tap away on phones and tablets rather than a long scroll.
Made civilization dossiers stay readable on tablets with the navigation panel open, instead of squeezing into narrow columns.
Replaced the mobile menu's "back to main menu" row with a direct link to About this Site, at the foot of the navigation.

24 August 2026

Removed unused DLC symbols from the Wonder and victory reference tables. Availability details remain in the roster and Appendix G.

23 August 2026

Clarified which Town to convert and renamed the section to match. The guide now gathers the existing factors - City Resources, Specialist-friendly adjacency, production needs and the cost of delaying conversion after taking a Focus - so the choice is easier to make.

22 August 2026

Overhauled the Resources chapter. The class tables, the Treasure Resource list and the slot table now generate from a single record, so they can no longer drift apart, and all nine Treasure Resources show the ongoing yield they pay as well as their Cargo value. Many entries were corrected against in-game screens, including Kaolin, Marble, Camels, Truffles, Silver, Tea, Pitch, Cotton and Whales, several of which had the right number attached to the wrong condition. The chapter also now explains that a Resource can change class between Ages, as Horses does across all three.
Consolidated the trade material into Diplomacy, Influence & Trade, now the single home for Merchants, Trade Routes and Resource trading, and rewrote the Treasure Convoy explanation after three civilization cards turned out to contradict the claim that Convoys only ever run from Distant Lands.
Replaced three absolute claims that the guide's own tables disproved, in the Yield Wheel introduction, the Ageless building callout and the Reliquary Belief row.
Consolidated the Quick-Reference Appendices and renumbered them A to H.
Clarified that leader personas are sold individually, so you can buy one without owning the edition or pack it was bundled with.
Removed the Part 1 and Part 2 banners from the Victory and Advanced Strategy pages, and the numbering from the Religion page headings. Both implied an order those pages do not have.
Enabled search-engine discovery with crawlable robots metadata and a preserved sitemap.
Added Google Search Console ownership verification without exposing account information to site visitors.
Reordered the gameplay navigation so Diplomacy & Trade appears before Happiness & Government and Tech & Civics closes the group.

21 August 2026

Applied corrections from launch-day reader feedback, including the early Scout guidance and the three-tile limit on ordinary border growth.
Condensed the Fresh Water guidance and folded it into the settlement-siting checklist instead of leaving it as a section of its own, dropping the claim that it was the single most consequential placement rule in the game. The rule itself is unchanged: founding without Fresh Water is a permanent -5 Happiness that no later building, policy or technology removes.
Tightened several overstated claims and rewrote the border-growth rules around the one hard limit and one growth rule that actually govern them.
Corrected figures that had drifted from the current patch, and spelled out the Wonder, Town specialization and Resource numbers the guide had been summarizing.
Added a dark-theme social preview for links shared on Reddit and other social platforms.
Added high-resolution civilization and dossier artwork in a click-to-open lightbox.
Kept mobile page navigation accessible while improving its sticky and collapse behavior.
Made civilization and leader links in profile overlays open the corresponding guide cards.

May your civilization stand the test of time.

Civilization VII Gameplay and Strategy Guide · Revised edition, August 2026

An independent, fan-created reference. Sid Meier's Civilization VII is a trademark of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and Firaxis Games.