Howdy Civ fans! I’m Taymoor, Live Lead on Civilization VII at Firaxis Games, and I work on our maps alongside Ken Pruiksma (who wrote a great article on our procedural map generation here). I’m here to tell you all about our newest map: True Start Location (TSL) Earth!

A Brief History of Cartography

Before we dive into the details on TSL Earth, a very quick history lesson on making maps. Map-making has been an important part of many eras of history, providing a means of transferring knowledge, imparting valuable tactical information during wartime, and allowing distant travel and trade. Maps are always constructed with a purpose, often practical, political, or both. They reflect the perspective of the map-maker and are basically never objective views of the regions they represent. Familiar maps like the Mercator projection were made for sailors to navigate accurately, but warped the sizes of landmasses as they got further from the equator. Others, like the Gall-Peters and Equal Earth projections, were made to more accurately represent parts of the world that might have been distorted in other maps. 

We also built our map with a purpose – fun. Our goal was to allow players to start as any of our civs (around 50 right now, and climbing!) and have a great time. We wanted to highlight each civ’s gameplay, historical circumstances, and support all of the systems that Civ VII brings to the table, while also allowing players to build their own stories on a recognizable map. Is the map accurate? Mostly. Is it fun? We think so. With that in mind, let's dive in.

What’s the Same?

If you’ve played Civ VII before, or played an Earth map in a previous Civ, there are some things that will be very familiar. Players will start on a map that looks like our Earth, in locations that reflect the locations of that civilization’s historic capital. After that, the game is yours and you can play through a full campaign!

Triumphs, Victories, and game effects all work like usual. You’ll go through Age Transitions and can change your civ if you want to. This won’t affect your map position, as that is determined by your starting civ. The map has three distinct landmasses – the Americas, Africa & Eurasia, and Oceania. These are still Distant Lands to each other, so don’t expect to cross the ocean until you reach the Exploration Age. 

What’s Different? (A Lot)

There are a few things we’ve changed about the Earth map from previous Civ games. Civ VII brings a new set of map elements to incorporate, including a new Tropical biome, Navigable Rivers, Age Transitions that change the map, and a larger footprint for Cities. We started from scratch for this map, though we kept familiar and fun elements from past Civ titles as we worked. 

Size and Projection

This iteration of the Earth map is Huge only, to give us the most space to work with and the greatest fidelity when drawing the map. We briefly considered trying an even larger scale, but that can significantly warp games (mostly by making parts of the map too far from each other to meaningfully interact). In addition, not every device can handle a map of that size, especially as you get later into the game and have more happening on the map.  Currently, Earth map will be available only on PC, Mac, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2.  

We made several decisions about the sizes of continents and various islands to maximize fun as we drew the map, and applied as much learning from previous Civ entries as we could. If you’ve played previous Earth maps, you probably remember large swaths of empty Tundra on the top of the map, or open Ocean on the bottom. While these were accurate to the planet, they took up space on an already-busy map. We’ve truncated both the top and bottom of the map as much as possible to free up space for more interesting gameplay. There is still a very recognizable, if shorter, northern Tundra, and most of the open Ocean in the South has been cut away entirely. This allowed us to make some central sections of the map, especially near Europe, Persia, China, and North America much more open. 

Another change we made was around the various island regions of the map, like Hawaii, Japan, the UK, and more. Many of these regions are the True Start Location for multiple civs, and we wanted to ensure they had reasonable starts in the Antiquity Age. To support that, we’ve “magnified” those islands to a much larger scale than the surrounding area. While space is often still limited, reflecting their relative historical size, island nations don’t feel like a challenge run every time. 

Room to Breathe

One of the hallmarks of TSL Earth maps is cramped starts, especially in Europe and other busy parts of the map. With a little extra room from truncating the top and bottom of the map, we were able to expand the playable area to prevent too many start locations from landing right on top of each other. Now you can play Spain, France, Great Britain, and Prussia in the same game and have space for (most of) your Capitals.

In a few cases where civs started too close to each other (within 3 tiles), we decided to move some players. This happens most when multiple civs with the same starting region (like our multiple Korean civs) are in the same game. In those cases, one of the civs will start in their TSL spot, while the others will be shuffled to other locations on the map, chosen from the pool of unused TSL spots on the map. We’ve configured this to never happen to the human player in a single-player game, but if two humans' locations clash in multiplayer, one will get moved. In those cases we check in player order, so the host will get to keep their spot. This is a new way to handle uncomfortably close start locations, but things in Civ VII are always evolving. One could imagine future game options that support players who want a very crowded early game experience, or even more guarantee of space in their starts. 

For the same reasons, TSL Earth doesn’t support Advanced Starts, so all Earth campaigns will start in Antiquity. In our current approach to Advanced Starts, we have players build a much larger starting empire, and that causes a lot of problems in the cramped historical starts on an Earth map. Here also, we can imagine future game options for Earth-specific Advanced Starts.

Biomes

With Tropical being its own biome in Civ VII, we revisited how we looked at biomes compared to other Earth maps. In previous Civ titles, tropical regions would often be represented by rainforest features or similar highly vegetated tiles. Now, areas like South America and India can get more detailed land representation. You’ll also notice larger sections of single-biome regions of the map, allowing for a stronger land identity as you expand in the early stages of the game. For example, much of South America is Tropical, so an Inca start near the Andes has plenty of Tropical, Vegetated, and Mountain tiles to take advantage of. But if you are looking for Plains tiles, you’ll have to venture all the way to North America. 

Rivers and Lakes

Another new element of this map is Navigable Rivers. There are many major rivers around the globe, and many civs that care about them in gameplay, so we tried to be as generous as possible. Major rivers like the Nile, Amazon, Yangtze, Mississippi, and more have all been placed on the map, as well as many more minor rivers across the map. When choosing which rivers to place, we used their geographic size, historical impact, and recognizability as criteria for which rivers made it. In some cases where rivers were too small to make it, but still provided important context for the land around them, we turned those tiles into Wet tiles. 

We used the same criteria for other map elements, like lakes, volcanos, and mountain ranges. For lakes in particular, we got to stretch what era of history we reflected. Certain lakes have dried up in our modern world, or changed shape due to human intervention and climate changes. Since we are representing a map that starts in distant antiquity, we chose to use the most interesting iteration of our various lakes. While Lake Chad in Africa and Lake Texcoco in Mexico are mostly drained today, we elected to represent them as they would have been in their historic past.

Natural Wonders

Including all of our DLC , we have over 20 different Natural Wonders that can appear on the map. In some iterations of Earth maps in previous games, we would set the Natural Wonders as part of the map design, guaranteeing certain Wonders in each game. While many elements of this map are locked this way, we felt that the random nature of Natural Wonders was better for gameplay, and it prevented certain starts near pre-selected Natural Wonders from being too strong. So now, you are guaranteed seven Natural Wonders, but they’ll be selected randomly. They’ll still show up in their TSL spots, meaning Mount Fuji will be in Japan, the Bermuda Triangle will appear off the coast of North America, and so on. This is a small tweak, but we think it will keep the game fresh for fans that like to play on Earth often. 

Resources

There are many Resources in Civ VII, and several of them change between Ages. In Antiquity, you’ll get a map with entirely hand-placed Resources reflecting locations where they showed up in the real world. On Age Transition we try to maintain this as often as possible. New Resources are added close to their natural locations, replacing old Resources if they can. However, if you’ve developed over those spots, you might not get as many new Resources of the Age. We stayed as close to the real-world representation of Resources as we could, so you’ll find that Resources like Llamas and Quinine are limited to South America, while France saves a few spots for Wine. Unlike procedural maps, we’ve placed all of the Resources on the map, so you won’t get a random selection, and you are guaranteed to see each Resource in every game. 

Behind-the-Scenes

Designing a map based on the real world requires more precision than usual. To achieve that, we improved our internal tools for making and manipulating maps. Civ has had world-builder tools in the past, some even releasing publicly for our modders and fans to use. For now, these tools remain internal, but we’re still exploring the functionality and how we might introduce a world-builder tool for Civ VII. In the interim, we have opened up the ability to set elevation, place rivers, and name rivers and volcanos through script. 

While we continue to iterate on these tools, we plan to use them to make more regional maps, and more bespoke and unusual maps (Big donut? Vertical? Only desert? The possibilities are endless!).

On a personal note, making this map has been a labor of passion. Many hours of “game design embroidery” went into placing each hex tile by hand, including its biome, terrain, resources, elevation and more. There were debates about many of the tiles, the shape of islands and continents, and continuous tweaks over weeks of testing. The Earth map reflects a crafted experience that we think you will really enjoy, so fire up a new game and check it out!