Civilization VII is going atomic. During a PAX West panel celebrating the franchise’s 35th anniversary, Firaxis and 2K laid out the strategy game’s next year — headlined by a free update adding a fourth Age in 2027 and the game’s first paid expansion, Earthrise.
Update 1.5.0 Lands This Month
First up is Update 1.5.0, rolling out later in September. The headline feature is the long-requested True Start Location: Earth map, which generates the real world’s land, features and resources and starts your civilization where it actually began in history, with natural wonders spawning in their natural locations. The update also reworks the Terra Incognita and Shuffle map types using the Voronoi generation algorithm, speeds up map loading, improves resource variety, lets players spend Influence to stay in an alliance without joining their allies’ wars, and adds UI touches like a tile ruler for city planning.
Arc of Tomorrow: The Atomic Age (Free, 2027)
The centerpiece. Arc of Tomorrow is a major free update launching in 2027 that introduces the Atomic Age — an entirely new fourth Age spanning roughly the 1950s through the 2050s. Firaxis says it’s even bigger in scope than last year’s Test of Time update, and the feature list backs that up:
- Period-specific gameplay with sweeping urban city architecture, updated tech and civic trees, new Triumphs, social policies and narrative events
- A new roster of Atomic-era civilizations and leaders — including the return of Gandhi
- Expanded nuclear gameplay with new offensive and defensive options and a new twist on mutually assured destruction
- Empire management tools that let you recognize settlement independence and release cities as City-States
- Great Works of Film, with Film Crews hunting for genre-perfect filming locations
- Manufactured Goods recipes that combine commodities into new resources like Enriched Uranium
Players can sign up now for a chance to playtest Arc of Tomorrow content through the Firaxis Feature Workshop, with the first playtest round arriving later this year.
Earthrise Takes Civilization to Space
Arriving later in 2027, Sid Meier’s Civilization VII: Earthrise is the first paid expansion, themed around the space race and humanity’s relationship with its own planet. It touches every Age: in Antiquity and Exploration you chart the night sky and name celestial bodies, in the Modern Age you launch early orbital missions around Earth and the moon, and in the Atomic Age you establish your own space agency and dispatch missions across the solar system whose discoveries feed back into your power at home.
Earthrise also brings environmental gameplay: new unit abilities and technologies that alter terrain, civil engineering structures that fight back against natural disasters as global temperatures rise — you can even reverse the warming — and biome-specific advantages as your civilization learns to work the land.
Why It Matters
Thirty-five years after the original Civilization launched in 1991, the series is committing to its most ambitious post-launch roadmap yet — a free new Age that extends history into the near future, and an expansion that finally answers the classic “one more turn” question with a trip to the stars. Civilization VII is available now on PS5 and PS4, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, and Mac and Linux via Steam.