Developer Interview

Firaxis president Jeff Briggs fills us in on the newest Civilization.

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Over the course of 15 years, Sid Meier's Civilization series has come to define turn-based strategy games. And the appearance of a new Civ game is always treated with eager anticipation. That's because few games have managed to combine the sheer addictive depth that Civ commands, and fewer have had such universal appeal. After all, the idea of taking a small tribe from the dawn of history and guiding it through the ages is something that everyone, everywhere can relate to. Yet a new Civ game always brings around some trepidation as well. Can Sid and his team recapture the magic? Can they improve upon the vaunted gameplay? To get the answers, we paid a visit to Firaxis' Hunt Valley offices, tucked away on the edge of Maryland's pastoral horse country, to talk to the developer about the latest Civ. And trust us when we say there are a ton of changes. So be ready to tear up your Civ playbook, because there are a lot of exciting and new things to look forward to.

Civ IV sports a new look, but it's the new rules that will most likely hook you.

One of the great ironies about Civ is that there are a lot of complaints out there for such a beloved series. Yet, for all the complaints that Firaxis gets about spearmen defeating tanks and other issues, the sheer fact is that the community discovers these flaws while playing the game endlessly. Civ is a game that's near and dear to many gamers' hearts, and as much as they love it, they also feel it's their right to gripe about it as well. Firaxis literally has thousands of community-submitted suggestions that were considered for Civ IV. But when you get down to it, every change has to be carefully weighed and balanced. "What I often say to team members is that there are a thousand ways to make a great game of Civ," said lead designer and programmer Soren Johnson. "We only get to make one. The mistake is trying to hit everything. We have to pick what our style is."

In essence, Firaxis is rewriting many of the underlying rules of Civ--rules that go back all the way to the original game--with the goal of making the game more about decision making and less about going through the established motions that have built up over the years. To give an example of just how serious Firaxis is, consider that you will no longer be able to transfer production from one project to another, a major exploit since time immemorial. Johnson admits he's a bit nervous about such a bold step, because it will certainly force Civ veterans to rethink their basic strategies, but it's something that needed to be addressed. Here's how the exploit worked. In earlier Civ games, let's say you had been building a great wonder for 39 turns. But before you could finish it on the 40th turn, another civilization finished it before you. No problem, because you could simply transfer all that production to a different project and pick up as if you had been building it for 39 turns. In Civ IV, when you lose a race to finish a wonder, you lose all the production made on it, and you can no longer transfer it to another project, though you will be refunded an amount of gold. (This rule also covers production of regular buildings and units as well, though in those cases, if you suddenly switch from producing, say, a settler to an archer, you simply save the production that's been made for the settler and start the archer from scratch. And when you go back to producing the settler, you'll pick up where you left off.)

Firaxis looked at everything in the previous Civ games and came to a host of other conclusions. For example, the designers realized that the pace of the game had become unbalanced and that you spent too little time in the early parts of a game. The solution? Introduce a lot more variety to induce decision making in the early part of the game...and get rid of a lot of the tedium as well. "The decisions were so uninteresting. Pretty much everyone had build farm, build farm, build farm, and on hills, build mine, build mine, build mine. And that was it," Johnson explained. "Now it's very much, 'I'll have this city focus on food so I can get some great people out of it. Then I'll have this city focus more on production, and this city by the ocean will have more trade routes. So I'll build some more commerce there.'"

You'll also need to pay a lot more attention to the map and to resources in general. "The thing that is going to stick out the most to Civ vets is improvements and resources," Johnson said. "In previous Civ games, you only had a couple of options with what you could do with your land. In Civ IV, you get about 20 options, and a lot of them are specifically tied into resources and technologies. If you have some cows, you can build pastures on them, but only if you discover animal husbandry first. You can discover certain technologies that let you build windmills on a hill instead of a mine. There's a lot more options to do with your land." Of course, talk about resources and you may get nightmarish flashbacks to Civ III, to when your mighty empire ground to a halt because it lacked oil or some other vital resource. Johnson said that key resources are more evenly distributed in Civ IV, which is good news. Other resources, however, are spread out on purpose. For example, there are a lot more food types in the game, and that plays a key role in the city health system. Basically, the bigger your city gets, the unhealthier it becomes. And that can take a toll on the population, as the city will eventually begin to starve. You can combat this by building certain types of buildings, such as aqueducts and hospitals, but what will really help is if you can secure access to the seven different types of food resources, which represent nutritional variety.

Expansionism is on life support. The focus is on fewer, better cities in Civ IV.

Meanwhile, as Civ veterans can attest, the latter stages of a game bogged down into micromanagement hell as you tried to oversee dozens of cities and hundreds of units. On top of that, you had to clean up pollution squares, which cropped up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Well, in Civ IV, pollution is gone and folded up into the new city health system. And one way to reduce micromanagement is to cut down on the size of your empire. This was always a problem in earlier Civ games though, as expansionism, or the rapid spread of cities, was pretty much the only way to go. Well, expansionism takes a big hit in Civ IV. "There was an obvious problem in Civ III, where it was always geared toward expansionism," said Barry Caudill, senior producer of Civ IV. "It felt like that it was basically the only way to play. The game is balanced now to have not as many cities. You can still spread your influence over a broad area, but not have as many cities, necessarily."

You can attempt to pursue an expansionist strategy, but Johnson explained that you'll encounter problems if you do. "In Civ IV, we have this sort of maintenance system that slowly pushes some pressure on civilizations that expand a little bit faster than what might be good for them at that time," he said. The focus in Civ IV is on fewer, but more specialized, cities. This is something that the artificial intelligence will recognize, too, as computer-controlled civilizations won't spam you anymore with settlers, and if they try, they won't be able to cross your empire's borders anymore without your permission.