Civilization VII 1.5.1 Notes: Great People Rework (10th November 2026)

Happy update day, Civ fans!

Update 1.5.1 is rolling out now to all platforms! Things are busy at Firaxis HQ as we work on Arc of Tomorrow and Earthrise, and we’re looking forward to testing these major updates with players participating in the upcoming Firaxis Feature Workshop. We’ll have plenty more news to share on that front when we’re ready, but in the meantime, we wanted to deliver an interim update focused on refining and iterating on the existing foundation (after all, you need a sturdy base before you launch into the stars!).

We’re building on our recent Diplomacy focus with Liberation, giving you the power to return conquered Settlements to their original founders. On the UI side, managing your empire gets a big quality-of-life boost with the new Map Search and Unit List panels. We’re also iterating on our recent Earth release with Random Earth - which shuffles Resources, Rivers, and Wonders across the familiar Earth landscape - plus the quirky new Donut Map. And finally, we’ve taken a fresh pass at Great People, removing them from City Production queues entirely so they unlock naturally through civ-specific milestones.

There’s more to discover in the full notes, so read on!

Before You Dive In…

Active Mods Will Be Disabled

This update will do a reset to disable all active mods. We highly recommend giving our amazing modding community a little time to update their work before toggling things back on manually. Using a mod that's been updated and is stable? You can simply re-enable these mods by navigating to "Add-ons" in the Main Menu. Browse your list of installed mods and toggle on the ones you want to play with.

Some Additional Reminders

• Update drivers: We recommend ensuring your graphics drivers are up-to-date and to double check our Minimum System Requirements for the best experience.
• Backwards compatibility: While we aim to maintain backwards compatibility for existing saves as much as possible, some new abilities or effects may not appear until you start a new game. For the best experience, we recommend starting a new game.
• Legacy branch: Are you playing on Steam and want to finish your current save under a previous version? You can do so using our legacy Steam beta branch. To join the legacy branch, right-click Sid Meier's Civilization VII in your Steam library, select Properties, then click over to the Betas tab. From there, select the “legacy” option.

As a reminder, you can visit our tracker to see known issues. If you’re encountering an issue, you can submit a bug report with the team here.

Liberation

Liberation has officially been added to your Diplomacy toolkit!

When you conquer a Settlement or acquire one through a Peace Deal, you’ll now have a third option alongside Keep or Raze: Liberate. If the Settlement was originally founded by another major civ (other than the one you are currently at war with), you can return it to its original owner, which will also provide you a little diplomatic boost with them.

If the original founder of the Settlement was a City-State that you were once the Suzerain of, you can also Liberate it back into a City-State with you as its Suzerain, reactivating your old bonus. Consequently, when you lose a City-State, you also lose the Suzerain bonus it provided. This includes when it's conquered, incorporated, or otherwise lost. Some bonuses that provide a bonus immediately, like free Units or Techs, are not impacted when you lose a City-State. You won't lose the bonus when the City-State is lost, nor will the effect trigger again on Liberation.

Unit List and Map Search

With Update 1.5.1, we’re continuing our work to make things even clearer for you as you build your empires with a new Unit List and Map Search. Both of these new panels can be accessed from the top of your minimap. For controllers, Unit List is accessed via Radial Menu and Map Search from the top of your minimap.

Let’s start with the Unit List, your one-stop-shop for navigating all of your empire’s Units on the map (especially helpful on those Huge map types!). You can search and sort your Units, see useful details like their health, remaining movement, and Unit Tier, as well as information like time to Reinforce and Commander respawn time. You can also issue a few basic commands directly from the list, including Sleep, Alert, and Upgrade, or select a Unit on the map to access its full range of actions.

Map Search now allows a way to search the visible map and highlight items for information on tiles, Units, Buildings, and more. A second search bar lets you choose what to filter out, so you can narrow search results down further. Additionally, we added a helper interface to show you things you can search for, organized by type. We’ll be continuing to improve and enhance Map Search in future updates, but we definitely wanted to get this first version of it into your hands, so let us know how it feels.

Randomized Earth & Donut Maps

We’re excited to report our map team has been busy with two more map types added in this update: Randomized Earth map and Donut map!

If you’ve been enjoying TSL Earth but want some more variety, Randomized Earth has you covered. The map is similarly generated to resemble our planet, but Resources, Rivers, Wonders and more are all randomly generated, so you never know what kind of experience you’ll get. You can choose to start in your civ’s True Start Location on this map as well, or for an alternate version of history, use the standard spawning rules for a random start. As part of this update, we’ve also added the option for a random start on the TSL Earth map. (We might have also added a couple rare easter eggs to Randomized Earth… can you find them?)

Next up, the Donut map! This was born out of playing around with some of our new maps, particularly maps with a large inland ocean. While it started as a silly experiment, we found it played well and created fun situations (especially in multiplayer!), so we wanted to share the fun outside of the design room.

The Donut map is a Pangaea-style landmass on a square map, so it's a little taller and less wide than our standard maps. There is an internal and external ocean (each with Distant Land islands) that do not normally connect, though some lucky rivers, lakes, and Settlement placements can create water bridges. We hope you find this map well-rounded, and have a hole lot of fun with it.

A small UI improvement to call out here as well: during game creation, map types are now organized into collapsible categories; no more big scrolling list. Share your feedback with us as you try out these new map types, and happy exploring!

Great People Rework

Previously, Great People were produced just like any other Unit, competing for a spot in your Production queue. In practice, we found that they often fell to the bottom of the priority list, meaning players could miss out on their unique Narrative Events and the impact they bring to the midgame.

With 1.5.1, we wanted to make earning Great People feel like a more natural part of playing each civ, so we've removed them from the production queue altogether! Now, each civ's Great Person Units have unique unlock conditions based on their playstyle. Meet the condition, and you'll automatically receive a Great Person from the available pool.

For example, playing as the Abbasid? Place a Specialist in an Abbasid Unique Quarter, and you'll be rewarded with a Great Person: the Alim. We've updated all the Great People descriptions so you can find their unique conditions on the game setup screen, loading screen, and in-game details panel.

(★ = Community Influenced Item)

Gameplay

Diplomacy

• (★) Players can now Liberate captured Settlements to return them to their original owners, or restore them as City-States.
• Harriet Tubman’s relationship notifications no longer trigger incorrectly when declaring a Formal War after a leader is eliminated.

Maps & Map Generation

• Added Donut map type.
• Added Randomized Earth map type.
• Updated Voronoi map generation and rendering across the world wrap, introducing more varied continental shapes with natural bays and isthmuses.
• Improved UI around Map Type selection during create game setup.
• Volcanoes on the TSL Earth map now have geographically accurate names instead of randomized names.
• Hides now only appear in the Antiquity Age on TSL Earth.
• Independent Powers’ Naval Units no longer enter Ocean Marine tiles in the Antiquity Age.
• Addressed an issue where added player slots would not appear immediately when creating games on huge maps.

Military

• WMD Strike notifications now explicitly state which War type will be initiated when launching nuclear strikes against multiple players.
• The WMD Strike blast radius preview now appropriately expands after completing Operation Ivy.

Multiplayer

• Players can now pause multiplayer games that have turn timers enabled, accessible via the ‘[’ hotkey or the game menu.

Units

• Reworked Great People to be unlocked via unique gameplay conditions.
• Abbasidian Alim Great People, Al-Jāḥiẓ, Ibn Sina, and Al-Farghānī now provide one free purchase of their respective Buildings (Menagerie, Hospital, and Observatory) when activated.
• Players are now notified upon acquiring Great People and earning the last of a specific type of Great Person.
• Updated the activation requirements for the Siamese Great Person, Chakrabongse, who must now be expended on a foreign Capital/Palace and grants 500 Influence.

Miscellaneous

• Added a new “Discovery” filter, allowing players to enable the Scout Lens and highlight Discoveries without the Scout.
• Urban districts on Vegetated tiles now have updated visuals to show this more clearly.
• Wonders are no longer removed from a Settlement’s Production Queue when starting construction on an adjacent Wonder tile.
• Updated the Game Year Progression scaling.
• Dev note: We did three things to improve how we calculate the Game Year you see in the top banner. First, we recalibrated the time between turns for each Age to properly reflect the actual number of turns in an Age. Second, we slowed down time at the end of an Age when a Crisis is occurring to represent the turmoil of this period. And finally, we found a bug in how months are calculated when game turns take less than a year in very contemporary times. With these changes, the current game date being shown should make much more sense.

Water texture now properly appears for the Kabaka’s Lake Unique Improvement.

Leaders & Civs

Leaders

• Addressed a reported issue where players were unable to skip First Meet cinematics.
• Addressed various animation delays and text issues for Ashoka and Ibn Battuta.

Civs

• England no longer displays Edward Teach and Ada Lovelace as unlock requirements for players who do not own these DLC leaders.
• The English City Hall (Exploration Age model) no longer appears when playing Time-Tested England in the Antiquity Age.

UI/UX

General

• (★) Added a Unit List panel, providing players a consolidated view of all of their Units. Accessible via a button above the mini-map or via the radial menu for controller players.
• (★) Added a Map Search panel, providing players a tool to search for various tiles, Units, Buildings, and more across the visible map.
• Unit icons correctly disappear from City Banners after Unit Production is finished.
• Players can now click on a Unit's portrait to center the camera on the Unit.
• The "Repair All" option now appears in the City Screen even if only one tile is damaged.
• The Commander Unit icon no longer disappears after editing the Commander’s name.
• Narrative Choice and Discovery Choice Turn Advancer notifications now correctly appear while certain lenses are active.
• Yield Previews no longer double-deduct natural production Yields when calculating placement Yields in the Production Menu. This change will make yield previews more accurate for certain Building placements.
• Added a new "Toggle Details" hotkey for mouse and keyboard to allow toggling details in screens and lenses without conflicting with the "Skip Turn" hotkey. The new hotkey is bound to the Tab key by default.
• Made various Quality-of-Life and visual improvements to Leader Attribute Trees.
• Improved touch responsiveness for Settler Unit movement when tapping tiles.

Controller-Specific

• The ‘Close’ button prompt for touch and mouse controls no longer displays on Production Queue items while navigating with a controller.
• The cursor focus no longer remains on the background UI when opening the Promo menu with a mouse and hotswitching to controller in the Main Menu.
• Improved cursor focus and navigation focus across various menus.

Text Changes

• Added new tutorials for Great People.
• Corrected text on Sengoku Japan’s Bushido and Daimyo policy traditions.
• Addressed localized text overlap and cutoff issues in various menus.
• Addressed instances of placeholder text in Hotseat mode.

Tooltips

• Added District Health breakdowns to Plot Tooltips.
• The Fortify action tooltip now displays the Combat Strength bonus and the two-turn requirement in the Unit Panel.

Narrative

• (★) Addressed various community-reported issues with narrative storylets not triggering or triggering incorrectly.
• Addressed typos and truncation issues across various storylets, Civilopedia entries, and tutorial messages.
• Updated the Historical Context in Edward Teach and Joseon’s Civilopedia entries.
• Storylet quest trackers no longer reset after swapping active players in Hotseat matches.
• Camera zoom no longer locks during a narrative choice pop-up when war is declared simultaneously.
• Increased the baseline number of activated Great People narrative stories from 1 to 3. (Heian’s Shijin remains at 3).
• Corrected several instances of incorrect tooltip text.
• Corrected several instances of inconsistent or inaccurate storylet rewards.

Audio

• Addressed various issues of missing or incorrect SFX.
• Polished voiceover leveling, mixing, and audio cues across screens and menus.

Platform-Specific

All Consoles

• Customized settlement names now appear as expected on the settlement banner after renaming.