Introducing altitude and dynamic geographic features.

[long phoenix]

One of the serious drawbacks of Civ7 is poor visual clarity. In particular, it is almost impossible to distinguish cliffs in the in game graphics. Players often end up wondering why a unit cannot move, then only realize the reason after zooming in and checking manually.

In Humankind there were also cliffs and escarpments, but they were never this difficult to recognize. Why is that?
The reason is that in Humankind each tile actually has its own elevation. Tiles with the same elevation naturally form continuous height levels, which effectively function like contour lines.

Cliffs, valleys, and hills are then built on top of this foundation. This approach is not only visually appealing, it also greatly enhances strategic depth while solving the visibility problem. Elevation must be introduced to Civ7, and it should be used both visually and strategically.

It is difficult to recognize the presence of a cliff from this image alone. Even so, it still has much clearer visual indicators than Civ7, but it can still be confusing.

However, once you give it a context similar to contour lines, the presence of cliffs becomes very clear. The human brain naturally fills in missing visual information according to the surrounding context.

[verbal rose]

• I disagree that you think its not visually appealing in 7, I think it looks super natural and gorgeous.
• I do agree that it could be more clear. When selecting a unit, aiding UI that highlights cliffs etc. would be great, also more lenses could help.

[sharp geyser]

One of Trixi mods does this nicely and it has been mentioned a fair bit in workshop

So fingers crossed

[long phoenix]

I said visual clarity

[long phoenix]

I didn't say that the visuals of Civ7 are not appealing. I may not have conveyed it well due to my limited vocabulary. Visual clarity refers to whether objects or information are visually distinguishable to the player. Even if I didn’t express it clearly, if you look at the context before and after, it should be easy enough to understand what I was talking about. Of course, clarity can be related to whether something is visually appealing. But that’s not what I was referring to.

[verbal rose]

I see. I thought so because I felt like you were putting emphasis on the fact that humankind has clear visual distinction between their tile levels. Like even without the contour you can clearly see which tiles are on which level, and I thought that you specifically found that visually appealing.

I find this a bit unnatural looking and I like it more with civ7, where tile elevations flow over into each other more gradually. But I misunderstood and perhaps you were not making any comments on this.

[night hinge]

This is especially an issue when the land is covered in districts, in an unbuilt map I think it's ok. I was thinking clarity could be added when you have a unit highlighted to move, it would colour certain edges of the hexagon to indicate the unit can't move directly there due to a ledge.

[nimble flax]

Cliffs in Civ 7 are pretty annoying, in Civ 6 it was nice because they were always along the coast so it was easy to see them and there was a clear gameplay benefit to protect from being attacked along the coast. In Civ 7 they are there and it just makes combat more complicated. The AI and I never take advantage of cliffs, so they feel very extraneous to me. If there were no cliffs in Civ 7 I wouldn’t have a problem with it at all. I think what you say makes sense because it makes cliffs more interesting and an intentional part of the terrain

[long phoenix]

That would be another answer. If they have no ability to include cliff features, they just can give it up.