GameInformer - Video Interview with Dennis Shirk

BL: Civilization 5…I think everyone can see that the big obvious change from the beginning…it's hexes. How does that impact gameplay?

DS: Well hexes impact gameplay in a few different ways…the most obvious is the way that units move around the map you can move in any direction its consistent. From an art style perspective you can actually have more organic feeling on the display or on the gamemap so you have naturally flowing rivers, mountain ranges, rolling hills…it all feels a lot more alive and vibrant. Oftentimes with older versions of Civ especially with square tiles you can have two caddy corner land tiles or two caddy corner water tiles…it's not always apparent to the player if you can actually move a unit from one tile to the other. There might be a land bridge but somehow you can still get a boat from one corner to the other. Hexes kind of remove that bottleneck you can easily look at a map and see exactly where you can and can't go it just removes a lot of the ambiguity.

BL: The units, how you place the units must have changed a lot as well and you've decided to go with more of a one unit per tile approach for this one. Can you tell us a little bit about the reasoning behind that.

DS: A lot of the military game in past versions of Civilization revolves around stacks, you'd stack any number of units in a tile. Our fan community calls that stacks of doom because they can get pretty large. This usually favoured the Civilization that had the biggest numbers advantage and what we wanted to do is kind of pull the combat out of the cities: every tile is important, every land feature is important, defending a hill, defending across a river, and every unit is important because units are more expensive now, they don't die immediately, you can bring them with you throughout the game upgrading them as you go along. You're going to be maintaining your army a lot more carefully, and instead of just having to have lots and lots of units everywhere and we're really excited about that because it brings a lot more strategy into play. Instead of just moving a single stack now you're actually managing units, you're protecting ranged units, you're keeping people away from your cities. We're just really excited about the possibilities that offers.

BL: If we take a look at the cities, how have they changed since Civilization 4?

DS:Well cities work a little differently I mean a lot of people ask themselves if there's no stacks how do you even defend the cities. First and foremost again we are encouraging people to take the fight out of the cities, defend the surrounding terrain instead. If your lines fail you have military units around your city. Your city can defend itself, the bigger it is the stronger it is, the more hit points it has. You can garrison a unit inside a city, that'll make it stronger. If you give it certain upgrades, for instance if you research masonry you'll be able to build walls; walls will actually allow the city to bombard outward two hexes and further defend itself. Obviously once it's surrounded it's under siege it's not going to last long but it'll still give you enough time to hopefully get help there.

BL: Another area that seems to have changes a bit is diplomacy, perhaps it’s a little bit more complex than it used to be. Can you tell us about that?

DS: Diplomacy, uh…traditional diplomacy in Civilization, interacting with other leaders is going to feel very similar in some aspects but the addition of full screen leaders, set in there scenes, being able to see the entire body to look at their body language, really can tell how they feel is really going to bring players into diplomacy like never before. They speak their own language, you're going to be able to see a mood on their face, they also have agendas in the background. Our lead designer Jon Shafer is going to great lengths to make these players more interesting to play against…it’s not just going to be subtle math in the background they’re actually going to have a certain way that they like to play.

BL: During the demo…I don't know if this was just for demo purposes but there uh wasn't all black when you started. Will it work the same way that you sort of scout you see and you expand the map when you explore.

DS: Yes, we just turn off fog of war for the demo just so you can kind of see the expanse of the world. You're going to have the same fog of war feel to it. What you saw there was obviously not final because we're pre-alpha but you're going to see the same billowy clouds and as you explore outward it'll reveal a little bit more of the map as you're going out

BL: Because to me the sense of exploration is like the best thing about Civilization. Sometimes I just start up game after game after game just to do that first few hours when you explore the map.

DS: Yeah, and you know what you're going to have that same fun with this and city states even bring a little bit more to this because you're not just finding another Civ you're finding city states and they all have unique needs, unique requests, so there's a lot more to do in the early game than we've ever had before and that's really cool.

BL: It's like almost like a mission based structure in that sense.

DS: In some ways it is to city states, that is distinct to them, they're going to be asking you to do stuff to gain that friendship, it's very worthwhile obviously if they're being overrun by barbarians, you're going to want to help them with that 'cause if you do you get bonuses from them and you can maintain that relationship. Likewise if you are getting bonuses from a city state another Civilization might be inclined to take that city from you, gives you another reason to defend it. It's just…it just offers more choices to a player and I think the more choices that the player has when they play a game like Civilization the better because it's all about crafting a world to meet your needs…if you're a builder you can play as a builder, if you're a warmonger you can play as a warmonger…it's just more choices.

BL: Speaking of the players, maybe we should finish off a little bit how you are trying to integrate the fan community into Civilization 5.

DS: Sure…modding is one of our biggest changes in the game…we're actually adding the ability within the game to allow anybody to browse, search, download, rate and install mods right from within Civ 5. You don't have to have knowledge of hardcore fan sites, you don't have to have knowledge of where the mods live online, you can just do it right from within the game. Authors will have access to tools they've never had before, or I shouldn't say that they've never had before, the tools now are just far eclipse anything that we've had before. The standalone worldbuilder is an example of that. We've created an application for the worldbuilder, it doesn't exist in the game anymore, now it's actually something where anybody, regardless of skill level, regardless of program level can create their own worlds to play in very easily it's…Just to amplify one point…Civilization 4 or Civilization 5 is every bit as moddable as Civilization 4, I want to make sure of that because I read on some of the fan sites they're worried about the level of moddability but I think everybody's going to love the tools that we're bringing out to even take that to a higher level.

BL: We'll look forward to playing it.

DS: I look forward to releasing it.

What's different in Civilization 5 over civ4...
There's a few of the bigger items that we've been talking about here, and uh...

Obviously we've got true tactical combat where we're going to one unit per tile which makes city, uh...Combat is pulled out of the cities...combat is part of the landscape. We want every unit to be more important, we want every hex to be important, defending a hill, defending across a river, defending a mountain pass.

We're adding ranged combat in. Generally ranged units are much weaker if somebody attacks them so you have to protect them, they might stand behind your front lines, fire over. That really helps with city combat.

Obviously a lot of players ask how do you really defend your cities now there's no stacks? Cities defend themselves now, so they have hit points, the bigger they are, the stronger they are, the more hit points they have. You can garrison one unit inside a city that'll increase it's strength. Likewise if you do certain research like masonry for instance you can build walls which allow the city to bombard outward which gives a little power. Obviously if your lines fail though and you've got guys surrounding your city and beating on it it's not going to last long.

It's just the whole thought of really bringing combat out and making things more interesting in the field instead of the traditional way which is stacks of units which our fansites so affectionately call stacks of doom, so...Jon Shafer our lead designer, big fan of Panzer General and one of the areas he thought would be really cool to change up, to try something new with was the combat layer in civ 5.

Russell Vaccaro, the interface designer on CivRev actually did the interface on civ 5, he learned a lot on Civilization Revolution about how to take an interface as complicated or with as much information to present as you have in a lot Civilization games and he had to make it work on CivRev all done on a gamepad which was a huge feat. We took lessons that we learned on that and applied it to Civilization 5 so all of the options are still there its just that the ones that aren't necessarily needed every single turn are under the hood. The players can still get to them but...in other words we don't let the delete unit op as the first button all the time, it's just not necessary and oftentimes unfortunate accidents...it causes unfortunate accidents with players playing the game. We just wanted to make it simple, streamlined, really accessible for new players but still just as powerful as it needed to be for experienced players.

Our modding community has always been extremely important to us in fact our community in general, we count on our fans so much in fact probably two thirds of our team you know is...that's probably an exaggeration, but a large chunk of our team has come from the fan community, and uh modders as a matter of fact. Jon Shafer our lead designer has been a modder for many many years, he did and he's been doing work for us since Civilization 2.1 when he was an actual tester. He did a lot of the scenarios in Civilization 4 and then again Beyond The Sword.

The change that we're doing in Civilization 5 are enormous, obviously it's just as moddable as it was in Civilization 4 that's one thing we want to state clearly, a lot people are worried it's not going to be as moddable, it is, and the difference is is that the tools that we're making, that we're including far eclipse anything that we've had before.

The standalone Worldbuilder which our fans have been asking for for a very long time we spent an enormous amount of time on that; it's easy enough for anyone to use, you don't have to be smart about programming, you don't have to know scripting you can just start the application up, make a map, play in a world you make.

Obviously in the game we made big changes and now everybody who plays the game is going to be able to access our enormous online library, or we hope it's going to be enormous soon after we launch, and access all of this fan-created content. You can download it right from within the game, install it within the game, they can rate it, they can open up the in game web browser go to CivFanatics and talk about it. We're just really excited about everything we're putting in especially to support the mod community

Of course with every version of Civilization we've said 'no' and they've still found a way to kill a tank, but Jon assures me that mathematically a spearman cannot kill a tank.

One thing you've noticed in this version is that every combat doesn't result in death, obviously units are more important, we want them to be more important, we want players to invest in them because they're...they're more expensive to maintain, they're more expensive to build, armies are going to be smaller. That kind of follows along with that, if you're building a tank and a spearman gets mathematically lucky and kills the tank that kind of goes against everything that we're trying to do with this game so he assures me that if you attack a tank with a spearman the spearman is probably going to lose.