How towns and cities work in Civilization 7

Aside from Civilization 7‘s transformative ages system, one of the most significant changes is the introduction of towns. In past games, all of your civilization’s settlements were cities, and they all worked in the same way. In Civ 7, you can have just one city if you want—your capital—and still expand across an entire continent thanks to the humble town.

Substantial changes have also been made to how cities grow and how buildings work. I’ve been playing Civ 7’s first two ages ahead of the launch, and can get you started with a basic understanding of this revised settlement system. Let’s start with some definitions before we jump into how it all works:

• Settlement: The collective term for cities and towns. If a bonus affects settlements, it affects both cities and towns.
• Town: A settlement with no production queue. Production is instead converted into gold, and buildings and units must be purchased with gold. Towns grow like cities at first, and can later be specialized or converted into cities.
• City: You always have at least one city, your capital. Cities have the usual production queue, allowing you to construct buildings and train units without spending gold.

When you start a new game of Civilization 7 in the Antiquity Age, you’ll be granted a lone settler, as usual. That settler will always found a city, your capital, but from then on any settlers you train will found towns.

Growing settlements

All of your settlements grow in the same way: When a certain amount of food accumulates in a city or town—the bigger its population, the more food it takes—a new citizen is created, and when that happens you can select a new title to add to the settlement. This is different from Civ 6, where the growth of city borders is connected to culture, not population.

Tiles added to a settlement start as rural tiles, and automatically get an improvement like a mine or plantation. (There are no more workers.)

Alternatively, you can add a specialist to a city when it grows, but I’ll get to that later.

How buildings work

In cities, you can construct buildings using the production queue. In towns, they have to be purchased with gold. Either way you do it, you’ll be prompted to select one of your settlement’s tiles as the building site.

If you place a building on a rural tile, it’ll be transformed into an urban tile. You can only create new urban tiles adjacent to other urban tiles, expanding outward from the center of your settlement, which contains a palace or city hall by default. Urban tiles lose their improvements, and are able to house two buildings.

This is a simplification of the district system from Civilization 6, where districts had to be constructed before placing buildings in them, and theming your districts gave you a bonus. In Civ 7, there are special civ-specific buildings that, when placed on the same tile, form a “unique quarter” that provides a bonus, but otherwise you don’t need to theme your urban tiles this time.

What you do want to do is pay attention to are adjacency bonuses: a building’s resource yields will be bigger or smaller depending on where you place them. The bazaar in the Exploration Age, for instance, gives you +1 gold for each adjacent navigable river tile, coastal tile, or wonder.

The exceptions are warehouse buildings like the granary, which provide bonuses to every rural tile in a settlement with certain improvements, regardless of where the building is placed. Granaries add +1 food to farms, pastures, and plantations, for example.

Warehouse buildings are also ageless, a designation which means that they don’t lose their bonuses when you transition from one age to the next. Regular buildings lose their adjacency bonuses when you enter a new age, but you can build over top of them, changing your city over time.

Choosing a town specialization

Cities are just cities, but towns can be specialized. The default specialization for a new town is “Growing Town,” which doubles its growth rate. Once the population grows enough, you can select a more specific specialization.

There are two very important details to note here:

• Once selected, a town specialization can’t be changed until the next age
• When you specialize a town, it stops growing and starts sending all of its food to connected cities

That second detail means that you can really get your capital growing quickly if you surround it with towns (one player took this so far they broke the game).

Regardless of specialization, towns continue to convert production into gold.

• Fort Town: +5 healing to units and +25 health to walls in this town
• Urban Center: +1 culture and science on quarters (any district with two buildings) in this town
• Farming/Fishing Town: +1 food on farms, pastures, plantations, and fishing boats
• Mining Town: +1 production on camps, woodcutters, clay pits, mines, and quarries (remember that production is gold when it comes to towns)
• Trading Post: +2 happiness to each resource tile in the town and +5 trade route range (Antiquity and Exploration Ages only)
• Religious Site: +2 happiness and +1 relic slot on temples in this town (Exploration Age only)
• Hub Town: +2 influence per settlement connected to this town (Exploration and Modern Ages only)
• Factory Town: Bonus gold towards purchasing a factory, adds an additional resource slot (Modern Age only)

Converting a town into a city

Towns can be converted into a city by spending gold. The amount of gold required seems to decrease with population. You’ll see the option at the bottom left of the settlement management screen.

When you transition to a new age, all of your cities except your capital revert to towns, and towns lose their specializations. This allows you to rework your strategy for the new age, but requires some spending to get your cities back.

Specialists

In cities, instead of adding a new tile when your population grows, you can add a specialist to an urban tile, max one per tile. (This sort of replaces the old system where you’d assign citizens to work particular tiles, but it’s not quite the same.)

Specialists drain resources (-2 food, -2 happiness), but enhance the adjacency bonuses of the buildings they’re assigned to and produce culture and science.

Resources

One of the main reasons to send settlers outward is to lay claim to the various natural resources on the map. When you claim a rural tile with a resource on it—wine, horses, gold, etc—you gain a copy of that resource which gives your civ a bonus.

Some resources are “empire resources,” and give your whole civ a bonus. You don’t have to do anything with them to get that bonus. Others are “city resources,” and must be assigned to a city for their bonuses to take effect. Finally, there are “bonus resources,” which can be assigned to cities or towns. (There are a couple other special types that appear later in the game.)

There are various ways to increase the number of resource slots in your cities and towns, which is eventually necessary to take advantage of everything your civ produces.

Capturing settlements

Pro tip: You can make cities very hard to capture in Civilization 7 by stuffing them with a ridiculous number of walls. Every urban tile that has walls becomes a fortified district, and an invader must capture every fortified district in a city to claim it. Turtle power!

Towns, however, are not so defensible: You can only build walls around their central district. This makes it much easier to capture towns, and they change hands much more frequently during wars as a result.

As usual, a captured settlement can be razed or integrated into your civilization, though its citizens won’t join you happily. If one of your towns gets really unhappy, its people may revolt and defect to a nearby civ, which is another way they change hands.

On easier modes at least, I’ve found that AI leaders are very willing to part with towns in exchange for peace when they don’t think a war is going their way, but you’ll have a harder time getting them to sign over a city.

More info on Civilization 7’s settlements

You can read more about how cities and towns work, as well as Firaxis’ justifications for the changes it made, in this dev diary on the subject.

I expect some of this streamlining—like tying border growth to food, replacing citizen allocation with specialists, and dropping workers—to be among Civ 7’s more controversial changes. I miss some of that detail, though I do like that Civ 6’s district system has been simplified (because I didn’t like it much in the first place), and now that I’ve wrapped my head around the importance of building adjacency bonuses, I do enjoy the light spatial city-planning puzzle the system creates.