Firaxis rolled out update 1.5.1 for Sid Meier’s Civilization VII on November 10, 2026, across all platforms. The studio framed it as an interim patch while work continues on two bigger updates, Arc of Tomorrow and Earthrise, which will reportedly be tested with players through an upcoming Firaxis Feature Workshop. No date for that workshop was given.
The headline addition is Liberation, a new option in the Diplomacy toolkit. When you conquer a Settlement or take one through a Peace Deal, you can now choose Liberate alongside the existing Keep or Raze options. Returning a Settlement to its original founder gives a small diplomatic boost, and if that founder was a City-State you used to be Suzerain of, Liberating it restores that relationship and the bonus that comes with it. Losing a City-State, through conquest or any other means, also strips you of its Suzerain bonus.
UI tools and new maps
Managing bigger empires gets easier with two new panels accessible from the minimap: Unit List and Map Search. Unit List lets you search, sort and manage every unit on the map, check health, movement and tier, and issue basic orders like Sleep, Alert or Upgrade without hunting each unit down. Map Search highlights tiles, units, buildings and other map elements, with a second filter bar to narrow results and a helper menu showing what’s searchable.
Two map types joined the roster as well. Random Earth keeps the familiar Earth layout but shuffles resources, rivers and wonders, with the option to still start at your civ’s True Start Location or go fully random. Donut map is a square map with a Pangaea-style landmass wrapped around an internal ocean that’s mostly cut off from the external one, aside from the odd river or lucky settlement spot. Firaxis said it came out of internal testing with large inland oceans and ended up being fun enough in multiplayer to ship.
Great People no longer clog production
Great People used to sit in the regular production queue, where they often got pushed down the list and missed entirely. With 1.5.1, they’re pulled out of production altogether. Each civilization now has its own unlock condition tied to how you play; meeting it grants the Great Person automatically. As an example, the Abbasid civ earns its Alim by placing a Specialist in an Abbasid Unique Quarter.
Other changes include multiplayer pausing with turn timers enabled, clearer WMD strike war-type notifications, a fixed blast radius preview after Operation Ivy, and adjustments to how in-game years are calculated so the displayed date tracks turns more sensibly.
What this means if you run mods
As with past updates, 1.5.1 disables all currently active mods on install. Firaxis is telling players to wait for mod authors to update their work before switching anything back on through Add-ons in the main menu. If you’re deep into a save and rely on specific mods, it’s worth checking compatibility before re-enabling anything, and backing up your save beforehand is a sensible habit. Players who want to finish a run on the previous version can switch to the legacy Steam beta branch via the game’s Properties menu. Starting a fresh game is still the safest way to see all the new systems working as intended, since some effects may not appear retroactively in older saves.
Source: Steam · Image: Steam
