Summary
Civilization 7introducesa new mechanic called Ages, splitting each game into several playable chapters that encapsulate different periods of human advancement. There are three Ages in total — Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern — but fans have a fun idea for a fourth.
“With the new Age system bringing semi-resets, it would be possible for a DLC to bring a doomsday device in the modern era that instantly ends the Age (or causes an Age-ending crisis). Triggering it would send the map into a nuclear summer/winter/insert apocalypse here,” u/m0st1yh4rm13ss suggested on the series' subreddit.
Civ already has nuclear weapons —Ghandi is infamous for being trigger-happy with them— and they more than fit the bill for a “doomsday device”. While firing them is devastating, immediately dropping a city’s health and fortification to zero, it’s also a diplomatic nightmare as you lose amenities and rapidly accumulate new grievances. An entire Post-Apocalyptic Age would take that idea even further, as a direct push into nuclear conflict could trigger a global war that sees the map reduced to rubble.
Looping Back To The Antiquity Age
Another fan, u/Horn_Python, even suggested that the Post-Apocalyptic Age could loop back to Antiquity, essentially resetting your game. Civ matches can already drag on quite a bit, but looping back on yourself at the very end with a significantly reduced resource pool and entire swaths of the globe plagued by radioactivity is a novel idea nonetheless.
While some fear that this strays too far into fantasy, especially with suggestions of aFalloutcrossover, u/Gastroid argues that there isn’t “anything necessarily too ungrounded about a fourth Age either being an Information Age or Post-Apocalyptic Age based on the outcome of Modern, emulating the idea of ‘what if the Cold War turned hot?’ It’s an outcome our world very nearly had on multiple occasions, and isn’t any more outlandish than, say, Teddy Roosevelt leading America to conquer China in 1500 CE.”
Despite the initial controversy around Ages, there’s clearly a lot of room to experiment and add depth to Civ even all these years later, and the idea of an optional Post-Apocalyptic Age spurred on by unchecked warmongers has turned a few people around to the idea. At the very least, excitement is starting to bubble at the prospect of what modders could bring to Civ 7 in the future.
