Following yesterday's announcement of the new Civ5 expansion, the three major fansites; CFC, Apolyton and WePlayCiv, have each been given the opportunity to ask 10 questions from the community to be answered by producer Dennis Shirk.
So this is your opportunity to ask about Gods & Kings. To submit your question:
Feel free to discuss what you'd like answered in this thread, or use it to brainstorm some ideas about your queries, but please note that only questions submitted by the method above will be considered. We'll take submissions until midway through the week, and hopefully we'll be able to get the answers to you sometime the week after!
NOTE: SUBMISSIONS NOW CLOSED
The selected questions:
So this is your opportunity to ask about Gods & Kings. To submit your question:
- Click the button (or button if you are using the Black CFC theme) in the lower left hand corner, under my avatar.
- Write out your question.
- Click 'Send Report'.
Feel free to discuss what you'd like answered in this thread, or use it to brainstorm some ideas about your queries, but please note that only questions submitted by the method above will be considered. We'll take submissions until midway through the week, and hopefully we'll be able to get the answers to you sometime the week after!
NOTE: SUBMISSIONS NOW CLOSED
The selected questions:
- What are your main criteria for picking new civilisations for Gods & Kings (and DLC)? While the announced civs seem to be bringing back old favourites and fan requests, civs like Polynesia hint you are aiming at a more eclectic and global selection.
- We know there will be many new units, including the Machine Gun and melee ships, so how have upgrade paths for units been modified in the expansion?
- Currently the optimal way of completing a science or diplomatic victory involves signing as many research agreements as possible and stockpiling a bunch of great scientists to complete the end of the tech tree. Are research agreements and great scientists being adjusted to reduce the strength of this tactic, and if so, how?
- Can you go into more detail about the individual religions and founding them?
- In the espionage system, what allows you to conduct operations? Is it based on Espionage Points (a la Beyond the Sword), or is it based on Gold spent (a la previous civs), or is it a new system entirely?
- Will there be any overhaul in how the AI conducts diplomacy, especially about its hastiness to go to war? Currently, the AI will DoW you if their oatmeal was burnt in the morning. There is little to no way you can prevent this from happening; it is generally a question of when a war comes, not if. In what ways will this be improved?
- There have been quite a few popular mods, such as InfoAddict, for vanilla Civ5. What was the influence of the modding community on the design of the new expansion?
- Can you tell us anything more about the release of the DLL, and will there be major changes to the way the game handles mods? More specifically, how it loads art assets such as building graphics, landmark graphics, terrain graphics, etc.? Right now, modders are severely limited in modifying these assets due to bugs with ModBuddy and the game's functionality - bugs that must be corrected if the mod community is going to expand past what it currently is.
- Will the new content and scenarios work with multiplayer?
- To what extent are improvements from the expansion being included in the vanilla release? Presumably things like improved AI algorithms will make it to vanilla while religion will not, but other things like the new units aren't obvious. Could you briefly describe categories of things that are getting patched into vanilla?