Ages & the Crisis System, Explained

The Three Ages

A full campaign moves through Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern — each themed to a distinct period of history, with its own exclusive civilizations, map-available resources, Technology and Civic trees, and even its own set of Independent Powers (minor factions) to interact with. An Age typically runs 150–200 turns at standard speed, roughly three to four hours of play. Age Progress builds every turn, with milestones along a Legacy Path contributing larger chunks toward completing the Age.

Legacy Paths

Each Age has four Legacy Paths — Science, Military, Culture, and Economy — each built from a series of milestones. Completing milestones earns Legacy Points, which get spent during the next Age Transition to acquire Legacies: bonuses that carry into your next Age. Completing an entire Legacy Path unlocks a Golden Age Legacy for the next Age; missing even one milestone in a path gives you a Dark Age Legacy instead (only one Dark Age Legacy can be active at a time).

The Crisis System

Officially defined in Firaxis's own glossary: a Crisis is "a series of historically-themed, cascading events that require all Civilizations to confront and adapt to the situation." Crises appear in the later portion of each Age, causing on-the-map problems alongside a set of Crisis Policies — negative-effect policies, kept in their own separate slot from your normal Social Policies, that every civilization must choose from as the Crisis escalates through its stages. The Age Progress wheel shows indicator "pips" for when a Crisis will trigger or intensify.

Confirmed named Crises include the Antiquity Invasion Crisis and Antiquity Plague Crisis, both multi-stage events in the Antiquity Age. The Revolutions Crisis, which previously appeared in the Exploration Age and required players to adopt a temporary government at its conclusion, was removed in a recent update because it no longer fit cleanly with a broader rework of how Governments function. A Crisis Picker option in Advanced Setup lets you toggle off specific Crises you don't want to encounter in a given game.

Age Transitions

Once a Crisis concludes, every player (and the AI) goes through an Age Transition simultaneously — except after the Modern Age, which ends the campaign instead. Three things happen: you select a civilization to represent your empire in the new Age, you spend Legacy Points on the Legacies you want to carry forward, and the game world itself evolves — new resources appear, the map can expand, and systems that were minor in the previous Age can become central (Religion, for example, is a minor factor in Antiquity but becomes a major driver of play once you reach Exploration).

Which civilizations you can choose from in the new Age depends on three factors: a historical or geographical connection to your previous civ (Antiquity Egypt into Exploration Abbasid is one official example), certain leaders unlocking specific civs automatically regardless of history, and gameplay actions you took that can unlock non-historical paths — Firaxis has explicitly said turning Egypt into Mongolia through pure gameplay choices is intended, not a bug.

Time-Tested Civs — What Changed in 2026

At launch, every civilization was locked to a single Age — you were required to pick a new one at every Age Transition. The Test of Time update replaced that with a system Firaxis calls Time-Tested civilizations: every civ can now start in, or continue into, any of the three Ages, not just the Age it was originally designed for.

Each civilization still has an Apex Age — the Age it plays at full, original strength in, exactly as it did before this update. Choosing to continue as the same civilization into a different Age instead makes it "Time-Tested" for that Age, which works differently in three specific ways:

• Unique Ability: stays central to the civ's identity but scales in power across Ages. America, for example, gains 50 Gold per improved Resource in Antiquity, 100 in Exploration, and 150 in Modern.
• Unique Units: become obsolete and stop being trainable, same as in past Civ games — though civ-specific Traditions can reapply a similar effect to modern replacement units (Rome's "Limitanei" Tradition, for instance, reapplies a Legion-like Combat Strength bonus to Infantry regardless of Age).
• Unique Infrastructure: carries forward into later Ages at full effect, but not backward — a civ can't build its Modern-Age unique building during Antiquity. This forward-only rule is offset by the Syncretism system below.

Time-Tested civs also gain access to a Unique Civics Tree for each non-Apex Age, built from one civ-specific Civic, one Civic shared by all civs with matching Attributes, and a Civic that unlocks Syncretism.

Syncretism

Once unlocked, Syncretism presents a one-time choice (available once per Time-Tested Age) between three options:

• Adopt another civilization's Unique Infrastructure.
• Adopt another civilization's Unique Military Unit.
• Skip both and take an Affirmation instead — a powerful Tradition unique to staying true to your own civ's identity, with its own policy slot.

You can only pick one of the three per Time-Tested Age, which is the actual strategic tension: borrowing a single piece of another civilization's kit to patch a specific weakness, rather than getting their whole toolkit.

What Persists No Matter What

• Leaders stay the same across every Age — unlike civs, your leader (and your relationships with other leaders) never resets.
• Traditions unlocked from any civ's Civic tree remain usable as policy slots for the rest of the campaign, regardless of which civ you're currently playing.
• Ageless buildings — completed Wonders and Unique Quarters — stay on the map permanently and can't be built over.
• Commanders keep their level, experience, and attributes across every Age Transition.