CiV VII The first 100 hours

First Impressions 

 I purchased Civ VII from Steam earlier this summer when it was on sale and almost immediately pulled an all-night session to complete a game. 

I decided I liked the game, did not regret my purchase but I also had won with little to no clue as to what I was doing. 

 Many of the objectives remained opaque to me. Like how to get a tile yield to 40, what even was a tile yield anyway? 

 The short version. 

I like this game and would recommend it, but with some reservations. It is a different take on the concepts of Civilisation games rather than an evolution of what has come before. From my point of view there have been three phases of Civilisation so far, the game from 1 (which I never really played) to III. I got into it around II but III is where I really got to like this game and I regards IV as the ultimate version of that classic style of Civ.

Then there are Civ V and VI which I regard as evolutions of the game from Civ IV. I liked the direction that the game was going in up to Civ VI.

Civilization VII is a different game, in the play and look and with the Ages system it is broken down into 3 mini-civilization games. The Ancient era, the Age of Exploration and the Modern Era. Which leads to the first problem many have, the leader is the only constant in the eras, identity of the civilisation is somewhat subsumed into the leader.

You can win each age and gain some boons into the next era or not and the next era becomes perhaps more difficult. Though there are legacies that mitigate the loss. And this is another issue that some may have. The end of the era occurs when it occurs and takes no account of what one is currently doing. One may be one turn away from destroying a civilisation and the era ends. The armies reset and the next rea starts out at peace. Each era is a game onto itself. 

It may inform and influence stuff in the next era, I personally thing that some things like wonder building should be continued or completed is it was say less than 4 or 5 turns to completion. Given the time jumps in the age transition.

You start off with a combat unit and a special type of settler called a founder and it and all settler type units are no longer auto captured in combat by hostile units. Barbarians are no longer really a thing; they are now independent powers and settle city states. Some hostile city states can act barbarian like but on the default setting are not as relentlessly hostile as barbarians were. 

There are no workers and the kind of stuff workers did are now done with working citizens of the city. This makes the selection of hexes to work more significant decision than in the older versions of the game since there is no way to back out of a decision. Urban tiles have buildings and these contribute to yields, science, production, money, etc. Up to two buildings per tile and some buildings last for the entire game, not just the current age (they are not over buildable). Wonders are not over buildable. I suspect that wonders outside the antiquity age are not as important, but I need to play more to really understand the role of wonders in the later ages. 
I know that I have not built much and not suffered much, at least on the standard difficulty.

The Good

• I really like the no workers
• I like that settlers are not a one-shot kill
• I like the independent powers system
• I like the ages system and this it will really shine in multiplayer. Both because a player can catch up, it enables a shorter game, and casual games with players who are using the game as an online social activity, rather than competitive deity level fiends. 

The Bad

• UI issues, there are still some UI issues, particularly noticeable fighting around built-up tiles. The UI is also quite clunky. Working out what building are in a tile, or its total yields are harder than it should. Bring back some of the building colour coding. Other than during the creation of a new building, I have found no way to figure out the adjacency bonuses, other than to remember them or look up the relevant documentation. Too much work.
• Player feedback, it can be very difficult to determine how one is doing overall relative to one's rivals. There is no score (though there must be some internal version, since it can grant to win to a player where none have completed the age completion requirements.
  To this, I could add in end game analytics or even end of age analytics. At the moment, or at least a month ago (since I last played), The age or the game can end and leave one quite uncertain as to how victory was achieved. When, exactly, did production outpace the rival civilizations? Not available, as far as I can tell. No graphs, no timeline. I want this back.

• I hate the wonder videos, bring back the Civ VI wonder videos

Finally

I really like the game and would give it a thumbs up but will admit it is a somewhat different game. I like most of the changes but have some gripes. 

Fantasygrounds Unity: Importing an NPC from a text stat block.

 Fantasygrounds has been my primary VTT of choice for many years now. For most of that time I have been running games using official WoTC D&D 5e campaigns. Recently, I have been working on a conversion of the classic D&D modules T1 - 4 The Temple of Elemental Evil which I purchased a number of years ago from DMsGuild. 

How I manage the conversion

In FantasyGrounds I create a new campaign to hold all the information from the original module and any additions I deem necessary and then export the campaign contents as a module to reference in the active campaign. I will not go into the details of this here, though if people are interested, they can let me know in the comments. 

There are some videos that cover this and many more topics here. 

This post is primarily for my benefit, to remind me of my process and in particular to let me remember, how I approached this, and some of the issues I had in the process and how I troubleshot those issues. 

The NPC character sheet in FantasyGrounds

The basic info on the NPC character sheet on FantasyGrounds Unity can be found here 5E NPCs and Encounters - Fantasy Grounds Customer Portal - Fantasy Grounds and pretty good introduction to text import of NPCs can be found here Using the NPC Importer

Some further information here Generating NPCs and Content for RPGs with AI Toolshttps://static.wixstatic.com/media/33b97f_7b4f32f552d54bc5b0ba0fd9459dcf15~mv2.png

I have a number of sources of NPC information, I can copy existing NPC statblocks and modify them and I can create an NPC from scratch by filling in the information directly into the NPC character sheet in FantasyGrounds or I can import text statblocks from D&DBeyond or other websites or pdfs I have purchased or that are freely available on the internet. 

A text NPC statblock can look like:

"Fred

Medium humanoid (human), Chaotic Good

AC 20

HP 30

Speed 30 ft.

Str DEX ........    etc"

Instructions for using the NPC importer can be found in the video linked under "Using the NPC Importer" which gives a very good overview of the process. The problems arise when this process does not work to produce a complete statblock.

These issues arise from the formatting of the statblock presented for import and how it deviates from what the import parser expects. 
There are 3 formats currently supported: "024 Core Rules " the expected default, the ""024 D&DBeyond" format and the ""022 Monsters of the Multiverse" format. I am not sure how the D&DBeyond format differs from the "Core Rules" version. 

The NPC stat block Import tool

The issue in that often any given third party statblock may not follow that format exactly.

One of the sources I was using for NPC statblocks is a conversion guide available from DMsGuild called "The Temple of Elemental Evil conversion guide with maps by Andrew James Woodyard and Eric Noa"

From the picture above one can see an example of an NPC statblock for import. Things to note for 2024 Core Rules the Armor Class is expected to be AC and Hit Points as HP followed by the number and so on. The issue I was having was that initially I had "Armor Class" and "Hit Points" and the initial sections were not parsing. 

The two panes in the tool are on the left the base statblock and on the right any world building or DM notes in the NPC.

Once I changed it worked until the parser got to the ability scores and then it failed, initially completely and then after some searching it would convert Str but nothing until traits.

A failed attempt to import. 

In this iteration I was getting as far as Dex before the parser failed. As one can see the Stats for Con, Wis and Cha are all 0

 
What I discovered that if one viewed the notes tab of the FantasyGrounds NPC Statblock it appends the Statblock to the Notes. 
See the image below. 

NPC Character Sheet

Switching to the Notes table reveals that the Dex save shown on the right is the default derived from the Dexterity ability (12) of +1 and not the actual save in the original ability section from the text source.

This can be seen in the image of the notes section on the right, captioned "Elmo Notes".

Elmo Notes

Here the save modifier for Dex save is blank and that indicated that there are too many spaces in the ability scores block between the Dex modifier and the save modifier. 

Incorrect formatting in this section can result in a complete failure to import most of the statblock. An NPC record will be created but most of the information past the point of failure may not be imported.

What I have noticed is, it is very easy to get the ability score formatting wrong, and nothing gets imported or it skips the ability scores and the skills, senses and other parts of the NPC information between the ability scores and the traits section.

It is a matter of trial and error to correct this. Just delete the failed imported NPC records in Fantasygrounds. 

It is probably a good idea to set the NPC Group to "Uncategorized" when initially importing and then move the final version to the category it should properly occupy at the end. By initially importing into a category that is unpopulated or has a low population makes it easy to find the record that was imported. 

Keyword ordering is also important, for instance, my imports were not bringing in the XP value of the nps. Again, looking at the Notes tab version of the statblock makes this more obvious. Since I can see an XP entry but one with no value and then realized that the 2024 version places the numerical value at XP not before.