Interview with Alex Mantzaris about BTS

[Swiss Pauli]

How? Civ is a game of production - both of units/buildings, and wealth. It's also tile based. Therefore more expansion early will always give you an advanage later - which is why Conquest and Domination wins tend to steamroll in the late game.

This seems one area that could be improved by making the AI less easy to defeat on the battlefield, and/or by increasing maintenance costs more dramatically for cities acquired through war.

Space on the other hand - the closest thing we have to a "default" victory may not play well if the end game is more in doubt - in order to go for space, you have to decide many many turns before you will launch your ship. If the endgame can not change substantailly, will it be safe to devote so many techs to spaceship research, and so many key cities to part production?

A beeline to Space already carries risk of attack, but there's no real need to launch in the mid C19. If you need to play a more balanced game to win, then that doesn't seem such a nightmare.

As for the other two victories, as long as Diplo is tied to population, any changes they make to that type won't counterbalance the fact that often the easiest diplo win is backdoor domination. Cultural victory could actually be harmed by additions to the late game - you need to shut off research for cultural, so if the late-game is prolonged, thats simply more oppurtunity for you to fall behind and get attacked.

Diplo can be tweaked to make backdoor dom more difficult. not an easy task, but should be possible. As for Culture, well, going down this road allows you to build a big army anyway as you can assign some cities to military. And maybe not switching off research altogether would be an interesting challenge?

I simply don't see how they can strike a ballance here - if the goal is to add to the late game and make it fun to play, they have to make the outcome more in doubt. But to do that they have to head dangerously close to making the rest of the game irrelevent.

One can counter this by saying that after the Classical era, most games are decided anyway, but that's not really the point. Era balance will be hard to find, but that's not to say that it should not be the goal. After all, it's called Beyond the Sword, so let's see whether it can live up to its own billing.

[scooter]

There's a pretty wide consensus that Civ4 drags badly in the later stages of the game, one reason why a lot of players often stop playing once the outcome becomes clear. Yet with Beyond the Sword, the designers are piling on MORE units, MORE buildings, MORE technologies... isn't that going to make the game drag out even further?

Going back to this post real quick, I agree with the statement, and I'm sure many people would agree that this won't help it much, but what would? After reading that I started to wonder what would help the late-game be more exciting. I thought about it quite a bit and honestly nothing came to mind really. Am I missing something or is there something that is causing the late-game drag other than the fact that the AI is just less competitive overall the later it gets?

[sunrise089]

Going back to this post real quick, I agree with the statement, and I'm sure many people would agree that this won't help it much, but what would? After reading that I started to wonder what would help the late-game be more exciting. I thought about it quite a bit and honestly nothing came to mind really. Am I missing something or is there something that is causing the late-game drag other than the fact that the AI is just less competitive overall the later it gets?

My guess - substantially raising war weariness. I've been reading a lot of high-level SGs over at Civfanatics. One common theme I see is that on Emperor+ games the team has a really tough go of things initially, but after a few wars they are clearly in the lead, and leave little doubt of ultimate victory. Since each conquest adds to your ability to conquer more later or outproduce/tech your rivals, raising WW would slow down early expansion, without raising the risk of the player actually being elliminated from the game. Now, I'm not saying this is an ideal change - personally I think it would make the game less fun, but it is notable that for most players their average Conquest or Domination win occurs earlier than typical Cultural, Diplo, or Spac wins. Forcing players to wait until civic/tech/building options to reduce WW appeared would probably balance out those finish dates.

[Sullla]

Wow, surprisingly good discussion here. It's nice to see some of you struggling with the same kind of problems I worked on two years ago during Civ4 alpha testing.

The issue of how to deal with the endgame has always been problematic, and the key points have already been touched upon in this thread. Focus too much on the late game, and the early eras of the game become meaningless. Yet if you allow a free reign in the Ancient Age, that can often make the final 200 turns a mere formality in a game that's already been decided. Where do you concentrate your energies?

When it came to the standalone version of Civ4, that was the first half of the game. We didn't really have a choice either; the later portions of the game didn't begin to shape up until relatively late in testing. You have to get the beginning right before you can proceed to the ending! So the focus was on getting the first half of the game done "right", with the period from the Industrial Age and after more tested to make sure there were no ground-breaking problems than having fantastic gameplay. I think this mentality comes across pretty strongly if you're familiar with Civ4's gameplay. No, the late game isn't as exciting as the early period... but is that such a bad thing? Think about it.

If we wanted to ensure that the outcome of the game would still be "undecided" in the late game, that would almost certainly require leeching most of the fun out of the first half of the game. (This was the stance adopted by danthrax, one of our most active testers.) You could do this in a variety of ways: crippling maintenance costs, raising defensive bonuses further, substantially raising war weariness (as sunrise just mentioned), and so on. The problem is that all of these things don't prove to be much fun. We had some test builds where attacking and eliminating a neighbor in the early game imposed economic costs SO devastating, it was better not to attack at all. There was literally zero gain in acquiring more territory. In those builds, the ONLY right strategy was to expand out to 4-5 cities and then turtle up for a space right. The games were close in the later stages, but the gameplay was one-track and boring in the extreme. When we moved away from that system, the gameplay vastly improved.

What I would like to see is a more streamlined victory process, to be perfectly honest. In Master of Orion, once you've become the dominant power it's VERY easy to cash out with a victory and move on to another game. Civ4's not quite as bad as Civ3, but winning the game can often be a rather tedious affair. Beyond the Sword may actually help in this regard, since there's supposed to be a wonder that moves the diplomatic victory further up the tech tree; we'll have to wait and see.

This may sound like heresy, but I think Civ4's already dangerously close to being too complicated of a game. We have so many different elements going on at once in a game, it's extremely intimidating for newcomers. One of the design goals for Civ4 was to make the game more accessible for non-vets of the series; I think that the point-and-click interface is a plus, but otherwise we definitely did not succeed in that regard. There are some folks who think any additional complexity in strategy games is a good thing, but I believe that simplicity is quite often a better way to go. (Just compare MOO1 to MOO3 for a good example.) Beyond the Sword is going to pile on several layers of additional complexity with spies, corporations, and lots of new units. I guess we'll find out if that proves to be an improvement. Although I understand that it wouldn't sell copies of an expansion, in an ideal world I'd like to see Civ4 move in the opposite direction.

[LKendter]

This may sound like heresy, but I think Civ4's already dangerously close to being too complicated of a game. We have so many different elements going on at once in a game, it's extremely intimidating for newcomers.

I was a Civ3 vet, and I almost gave up on Civ4. The initial learning curve was brutal in Civ4, and I still feel like a newbie in Civ4. When I went from Civ2 to Civ3 I was comfortable after realizing the handful of key differences. I never got that feeling going from Civ3 to Civ4.

Even a simple change of roads not producing trade income really changed worker actions. There seems to be no clear feel for how important players think roads are. I think I rate them higher then average since I feel lines of travel are very valuable in war, yet others want to only build roads when forced to connect resources.

Since Civ3 was simpler, it was actually easier to play in SG format. I am still finding it a lot harder to get everyone on the same page with Civ4 as there are so many ways to get from point A to point B. I feel Civ3 SGs let you play above your level thanks to the team, but it still feels that Civ4 SGs need to play a difficulty below. I've still had problems with teams trying to coordinate complex plans with Civ4.

My number one fear with the new expansion is a overload of even more decisions when it is hard to handle the existing choices and balance them all for optimal empire building.

[RU Okie]

I find this discussion very interesting. I had never heard of Civ before Civ3, and I never got "a feel" for the game. I had difficulty with it progressing past the 2nd difficulty level (I think Chieftan?) unless I just tried ICS which I think was exploitative. With CIV I found it much more intuitive, although certainly more complex and more fun since there was less micromanagement. Now even with that I can only beat Prince about 50% of the time since I just don't pay close enough attention while still enjoing the game.

I enjoyed Warlords (without vassalls) for about 4 months and now am back on vanilla. That is mainly lazyness since I hate swapping the disks. In actual gameplay there is not much difference except with the AI (just drop a difficulty level on Warlords)

[Atlas]

This thread is very interesting, but a serious logical flaw continues to rare its head (and I feel compelled to point it out), many have argued that the don't want to pay 30$ for an expansion without much content and then argue that all the extra content is going to unbalance the game

The vassal system is a "turn off" feature, you don't have to play with it and many don't. So what is wrong with Warlords that can not be changed by turning vassals off. New leaders are good, new traits (while not that interesting IMHO) were not unbalancing (maybe Expansive post 2.08?), unique buildings are alright, great generals are fun, 3 new wonders were okay. I don't know if that is a lot or a little content or if that amount of content is worth X dollars, but I don't think it radically changed Vanilla balance (with the vassal system turned off) and in some respects actually IMPROVED Vanilla balance- like the Chariot v. Axe change. With vassals turned off, Off the top of my head I can't think of a single negative thing about Warlords' game play.

Some of the BtS new features are much more complex than anything added to Civ since the release of Vanilla. Those that want beau coop content added will not be disappointed, but it cannot be both ways (lots of content with no risk of disturbing balance, there can be content and potential unbalance or little content and balance remains unchanged). It will take time for Civ's communities and subcommunites to weigh in and determine the expansion's positive and negative aspects. I think we should reserve judgment on the expansion's "balance" until knowledge of its mechanics are widely know- the devil is in the details.

PS - For an example of the flawed expansion system - check out BetterAI in warlords. Blake and Co have done a great job at significantly altering the game basically for free. Firaxis recognized this impressive achievement. They still had a launch window to work with however, so they grabbed an early, incomplete version of BetterAI. In other words, they were willing to include it to add to the feature-set, but not willing to make sure it actually offered the player an ideal experience. Tell me that says something good about the expansion process.

BetterAI (IIRC) was not added to the Warlords expansion, but was added in the 2.08 Warlords patch.

But setting aside that point I would ask- Is the play experience better or worse with the version of BetterAI that was included in that patch? I think the answer is clearly that it is better with Blake's AI included. Was the BetterAI project complete? No, so? Would people prefer to delay the patch? or that the BetterAI not be included? No. So what's the beef?

[Gyathaar]

Beyond the Sword is going to pile on several layers of additional complexity with spies, corporations, and lots of new units. I guess we'll find out if that proves to be an improvement. Although I understand that it wouldn't sell copies of an expansion, in an ideal world I'd like to see Civ4 move in the opposite direction.

It would be really hard to sell an expansion that take away stuff you had before
(well.. I guess in theory you could make a civ expansion that only focus on a specific era (or a smaller timeframe.. say 500AD to 1500AD).. so you remove all ancient ages etc techs, units and replace them with a full techtree for e.g. only the renaissance era.. but then the expansions would just be one big glorified scenario of sorts)

[T-hawk]

Warning, near-Sirian-length post ahead...

Focus too much on the late game, and the early eras of the game become meaningless.

I don't think there's a qualitative difference between early warfare in Civ 3 and Civ 4. The chief difference is the speed. In Civ 4, horse units are weaker and counterable so you must use slower melee and gunpowder units; healing time for wounded units is much longer; and cultural borders shift much slower so combat settlers are out. All these brakes extend the critical period of warfare from the early medieval era in Civ 3 to the mid-industrial period in Civ 4. But a game designer can't go too far with these brakes, or otherwise the only right answer is to turtle up to an economic (spaceship) win.

For military campaigns, Civ 4 actually snowballs more so than Civ 3. The reason is captured cities don't have production losses to corruption. In Civ 3, a captured city would not produce units except by rushing them. In Civ 4, a captured city often has 10-20 hammer production right away and can crank out more units in short order. The flip side is that a military snowball in Civ 4 does carry the risk of falling behind in economy, perhaps critically so.

So Civ 4 gets this right both ways: a clear military advantage turns into an actual win sooner; and a military snowball attempt carries real risk. (If you're ahead in tech such that the military rollup carries no real risk, then you've already won an economic victory, and the military implementation of it is just a formality.)

IMO, Civ 4 vanilla really does get the balance of warfare just about right. Military or economy or a combination are both viable paths in almost all games. And this balance rests on a thin edge that could easily be nudged in either direction by small factors in the expansions. In Civ 3 Conquests, the simple addition of the trebuchet unit became a strong push toward warfare in that era. In Civ 4 Warlords, vassal states are a powerful push towards warfare, while BetterAI encourages economic turtling. Are those pushes balanced? We don't know because we haven't gone through enough of a playtesting process. (And I admit that the real-world economic reality just doesn't provide for that.)

What I would like to see is a more streamlined victory process, to be perfectly honest.

Agreed. Civ 4 needs a "mercy rule". If you're ahead of the next civ by at least 10 techs and double the military power, just end it. That's what a "domination" victory really should be. Domination was originally conceived in Civ 3 as a shortcut to conquest, but the implementation is lacking, because of the technical tedium of growing population and expanding borders in conquered cities.

None of the Civ games have ever had a viable prospect of come-from-behind victory. For SP games against the AI, the player can fake it by staying peaceful while everybody else kills themselves in wars (hello RBE2 ). But that's an artifact of the AI behavior, not of the actual game mechanics.

How to implement a realistic and satisfying comeback victory prospect is beyond me, though. Civ 4 provides a little bit of that with the diplomatic and cultural win conditions, where a player who's trailing can gamble everything on hitting one of those. But such victories tend to be more upsetting for the dethroned than satisfying for the comeback victor. Think back to Adventure 11 (the game with permanent alliances and united AI teams), where I technically had the best result with the cultural victory, but everyone (including me) agreed that Sulla and Kylearan turned in better performances. Any victory path that allows a clearly trailing player to win will feel cheap.

This may sound like heresy, but I think Civ4's already dangerously close to being too complicated of a game.

I wholeheartedly agree. What originally drew me into the Civ games (I've played since Civ 1 in high school) was the simple elegance of the game mechanics. Everything you ever gazed on - the population and buildings in your cities, their military units, your technologies - all came from the single simple elegant idea that each population unit worked one square to produce one batch of food, shields, and trade each turn. There were a few ways to convert between types of production, but fundamentally everything was built from the ground up.

Throughout the Civ series, that simple elegant premise has been continually diluted. Top caliber strategies in Civ 2 rest on exploiting caravans for big instant cash payouts and then spending at your leisure. Alpha Centauri had the supply crawlers, which completely circumvented the putative population limits, mind worm "farming" for more cash payoffs, and forest chopping for freebie shields. Civ 3 saw the introduction of Great Leaders which are the ultimate production shortcut, Armies which bring a whole additional subsystem for units and combat, strategic resources which could suddenly render it impossible to apply your production in the way you wanted to, and drafting to instantly create units out of nothing.

And thus in Civ 4, much of the strategic gameplay lies in manipulating the freebies and multiplicative math rather than the core game mechanic. The entire Great People subsystem essentially results in a set of shortcuts for tech or wonder costs, to the extent that entire game plans are bent towards popping certain Great People at certain times. Many of the production bonuses (I'm looking at you, Bureaucracy) feel like gifts handed out by the game rather than something you really earn. Even the traits like Financial and Philosophical feel the same way. Culture, which in Civ 3 followed the simple elegant premise that each building each turn produced X, has in Civ 4 all sorts of multipliers and bonuses and freebies. The citizen happiness system has gone from the simplicity of building temples and hiring Elvises, to a dozen overlapping factors in civics and wonders and resources and religion and war weariness. And combat has gone from a simple dice roll on two unit strengths, to a hugely complicated system with 100 HP and multiple rounds and conditional promotions and obscure formulas to calculate damage and firepower.

Even Warlords introduces some inelegant changes on top of Civ 4. We had a perfectly good Great People system, and then Warlords introduces Great Generals that follow a completely different set of rules and rewards. We had a perfectly good diplomatic system, and vassal states were messily glued onto that. We had a perfectly good set of leaders and traits, and then Warlords diluted and reshuffled all of that for no good reasons.

Sure, it all makes for more variety than in earlier Civs, but I still feel like I'm following a number of predefined variant paths rather than really creating my own. I feel like I'm manipulating the fringe elements much more than the game system itself. This more than anything else expresses why I'm burned out on Civ 4. Managing all the game subsystems has turned from a fun exercise to a management chore. Not in the sense of literal clicky micromanagement, but in the sense that you always have more and more factors weighing on you that need attention. There are so many options that I feel more burdened by the need to neglect some than satisfied in the options I choose to exercise.

I understand that's the core of what makes a strategy game deserving of the name. It's great that there's so many viable paths, and more power to those who explore them. But for me personally, the loss of elegance in the game mechanics has taken a serious toll on the fun factor. And that's a trend that will certainly never be reversed by further expansions and sequels. So I'm clinging to v1.61 like a favorite worn blanket, since piling yet more complexity into the game really doesn't excite me.

[sunrise089]

This may sound like heresy, but I think Civ4's already dangerously close to being too complicated of a game. We have so many different elements going on at once in a game, it's extremely intimidating for newcomers.

100% agree. When I first playing Civ, and when I try to introduce new folks to the game now, the ammount of choices and systems to keep track of is simply ridiculous. You can have so much help - automated scouting, tile working, worker actions, even builds as suggested by the advisors, but there are still so many high-level choices that have to be made and different factors to take together. Now add in MM to optimize gameplay and turn off automation, and there are some things I just plain don't like about the game - Quick speed tile improving is one of them, where I feel the techs are often coming in far quicker than my ability to improve my cities, and on any speed the fact that Factories, power plants, infantry, and more all appear together makes me want to pause the game in frustration.

many have argued that the don't want to pay 30$ for an expansion without much content and then argue that all the extra content is going to unbalance the game

Some, but not all. See my desire for a $5 patch rather than an expansion.

So what is wrong with Warlords that can not be changed by turning vassals off.

When the #1 new feature is totally broken I'd say that is pretty wrong.

But setting aside that point I would ask- Is the play experience better or worse with the version of BetterAI that was included in that patch?

Good point, and I was incorrect about when BetterAI was added. Still, doesn't that make my point more valid? They were willing to try to improve the game FOR FREE, but then they picked an arbitrary point and stopped. I think 1.61 and 2.0.8 clearly both need one additional patch. Why not release it?

Are those pushes balanced? We don't know because we haven't gone through enough of a playtesting process. (And I admit that the real-world economic reality just doesn't provide for that.)

Why don't economics justify it? Vanilla was playtested more than Warlords, and made a ton of $$$. Warlords required far fewer resources to develope - no graphics engine, few new game mechanics, very little new art or music, so since it sold for about the same thing Civ was selling for at that time, why couldn't it have the same testing process?