Firaxis reveal Civilization 7's not good enough at building attack maths, tanking its late-game performance - a patch/tutor is here

Also, you can now let your teenager play Civ without exposing them to microtransactions

Band of soldiers + building. What does that equal, Civ 7? It's ok, stop panicking. I know you've been struggling with some late-game maths, and Firaxis have gotten you a tutor in the form of a fresh patch, which also rolls out 2K's teen accounts. The latter allow parents to cut off access to a few elements of the strategy game, in an effort to keep under 18s safer from forces that aren't nuke-happy Confucius.

"Addressed an issue that was causing late game performance drops," read the notes for the freshly released Update 1.3.2 – Patch 2, with a dev not continuing: "Game logic checking for attackable buildings was improved to avoid unnecessary and expensive calculations." So, inefficient sums choking up industrial era scraps mid-siege by the sounds of things. I can't help but feel the unnecessary and expensive calculations bit sounds l-ike someone chewing out their accountant.

Beyond that, Firaxis have "addressed a crash that players could experience during Next Turn AI processing" and added support for 2K's teen accounts, which cover those old enough to create a full 2K account, but still under the age of 18. Before you panic that the latter might ban under 18s from advancing beyond the stone age or prohibit them from pivoting to a fascism at the first opportunity because they like killing things, I've taken a look and it's more along the lines of basic parental controls.

Basically, you can head to a 'Game Permissions' section of your 2K account and toggle off the ability to play online, engage in text chat with other players, and see any in-game microtransactions that use real money. The last one covers 2K's virtual currency, DLC, and/or battle passes. All of these are things parents already have option to restrict access to for 2K's child accounts.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

Going back to Civ 7, if you're wondering where the Test of Time update that'll bring back playing as one civ for the whole game is at, Firaxis added in a Discord post about this patch that they're "still hard at work" on it and that news is to come. So, for now it's still loosely timetabled for Spring this year.