Civilization 7 player stacks so many bonuses that the game breaks and demands negative food

Breaking Civilization 7 With Absurd Stacking Bonuses - YouTube Breaking Civilization 7 With Absurd Stacking Bonuses - YouTube
Watch On

With Civilization 7's new ability to mix-and-match leaders and civs, and all the bonuses available from civics, wonders, and new features like leader attributes, there is a goofy amount of optimizing you can do. While playing a preview build of the game—which isn't out for a couple more weeks yet—YouTuber Drongo decided to see how far they could push it. It's safe to say that they pushed it to its limit, because the game stopped working.

You can watch Drongo's video above. It's sponsored by 2K for a new channel called One More Turn, so consider the praise for Civ 7 with that context in mind, but the mechanics of the game-breaking optimization are the interesting thing to me. It was clear to me from my own experiences previewing Civ 7 that you can go wild with bonus stacking if you want to, but I'm not really the theorycrafting type—I just want to build cool wonders so I can admire them, not because I have some big plan in mind.

Drongo is the other kind of player. I'll leave the full details of this game-breaking build to the video, but the gist is that playing as Confucius with the Khmer civ, Drongo focused all his energy on stacking food and growth bonuses. Just a few of them:

  • Confucius grants 25% growth rate in cities
  • The Khmer Empire's unique ability prevents urban districts from removing a tile's natural yield, meaning you can build up your city without sacrificing food
  • The Khmer Baray improvement increases food in all floodplains in a settlement
  • The Khmer Chakravarti Civic increases growth rate in the capital
  • He selected multiple leader attributes that increase growth and food production
  • He made all his towns specialize in farming

By turn 76, Drongo had stacked around 18 bonuses and was producing 263.5 food per turn. For comparison, at turn 87 in a recent game, I was producing a pathetic 59 food per turn. Granted, I had been playing in exactly the opposite manner: focusing all my energy on pointlessly building a really long Great Wall, purely for aesthetic reasons. (I think that makes my leadership style more historically accurate.)

Sadly, Drongo did not get to create the world's first urban sprawl before the invention of mathematics, because Civilization 7 simply couldn't handle that much food and that many people. At turn 98, he noticed that his capital had stopped growing. Upon further inspection, he discovered that Civ 7 was asking for -1112 food to produce a new citizen. It's not clear why the game invented the concept of anti-food, but it must have something to do with Drongo's absurd agricultural domination.

Firaxis will probably have fixed that bug by the time Civ 7 releases on February 11. Not that I would ever encounter it anyway, since my citizens won't have time for surplus food production with all the pointless building projects I plan to demand of them.

Tyler Wilde
Editor-in-Chief, US

Tyler grew up in Silicon Valley during the '80s and '90s, playing games like Zork and Arkanoid on early PCs. He was later captivated by Myst, SimCity, Civilization, Command & Conquer, all the shooters they call "boomer shooters" now, and PS1 classic Bushido Blade (that's right: he had Bleem!). Tyler joined PC Gamer in 2011, and today he's focused on the site's news coverage. His hobbies include amateur boxing and adding to his 1,200-plus hours in Rocket League.

Read more
Cropped Civilization 7 concept art featuring Amina, Queen of Zazzau, pointing a sword menacingly.
Civilization 7 senior historian prays it'll be a 'gateway drug' into textbooks: 'I teach undergraduates in my other life, and my God, man, they don't read'
A screenshot of Lycerius' Civilization 2 Eternal War.
'A hellish nightmare': Remembering the most famous Civilization game ever played, Civ 2's 'Eternal War'
Digital Ben Franklin looking very perturbed on dark background
Brace yourselves Civ fans: Civilization 7 is going to be contentious among critics and fans
A still from the Civilization 7 opening cinematic.
Sid Meier's Civilization needs to keep reinventing itself to stay relevant
Civilization 7 screenshot
Not even the most powerful gaming PC is going to get around Civilization 7's ridiculously variable performance
Confucius as he appears in Civilization 7.
Some 20 hours in, I can say that Civilization 7's age transitions are the series' most radical and disruptive mechanic yet
Latest in Strategy
A castle being beset by horrors.
Cataclismo review
Key art for the new Age of Empires 2 expansion showing an angry Viking and Japanese warlod.
Age of Empires 2 team continues to cook while delivering 'legendarily long' 8,000-word patch notes about 'the biggest updates' the 26-year-old game has ever had
Mechs fight on the outside of a spaceship
MechWarrior 5: Clans is getting DLC with playable Elementals and a fight on the outside of a spaceship
Mongolian throne room
Crusader Kings 3 saddles up for a long-awaited return to the east with its first Asian DLC, Khans of the Steppe
Manor Lords promo art - knight on horseback looking at a medieval village in the distance, viewed from behind
PCG's best city builder of 2024 is adding a map with a gigantic hill in the middle: the perfect spot for your next castle
Maximillian from Evil Genius 2
Rebellion CEO says Evil Genius 3 could happen but wonders 'what else could we do with it other than a base-building game?'
Latest in News
helldivers 2 democratic detonation
Johan Pilestedt warns that Helldivers 2 took 4 more years than planned because Arrowhead skipped pre-production and dove right in: 'Always do your homework before you start spending millions and millions and millions of dollars in making a game'
helldivers 2 arrowhead CCO johan pilestedt
Helldivers 2's Johan Pilestedt says developers need to start taking more risks: 'Safe bets are a death sentence for the studios that try to make them'
Split Fiction trailer still - Zoe and Mio staring into a large pipe
A pair of Split Fiction players will be heading to Sweden for an early look at Hazelight's next game after completing a secret challenge so tough, some developers can 'barely' beat it
Helldivers 2
Arrowhead’s CEO got a call from PlayStation when he said players could save their money and wait to buy Helldivers 2 until the servers were fixed: They ‘asked me what the f*** I’m smoking’
A man examines the implant in his beefy arm
New Ark DLC gets AI-generated trailer so awful that the original developer's washing its hands of the whole thing, and fans are in uproar: 'This is disgusting and you should be ashamed'
A screenshot of Helldivers 2, depicting a Helldiver saluting while wearing an anthropomorphic facemask
The United Nations asked Helldivers 2 studio Arrowhead if it'd give a talk on psychological manipulation: ‘Could we brainwash an entire community to fight for a fascist state? … Would we be okay with that? Turns out, yeah’