Ask Sid Meier Your Questions

[DanQ]

Next month, Apolyton Civilization Site (ACS) will produce and publish a landmark fiftieth episode of PolyCast, a podcast on Civilization strategy. To help commerate this and also extend the celebration of ACS' tenth birthday, game developer Firaxis Games' Director of Creative Development Sid Meier will be its honoured guest. Moreover, he will be in the spotlight answering questions not only from ACS staff but -- hopefully -- also from other members of the Civ community. To make this so, he needs to hear from Civ community members!

To ask Sid one or more questions, you can either post them in this thread or leave a voicemail: (301) 637-7659 (North America), +44 121 288 7659 (Europe) or VoIP for free via Skype. Questions must be submitted on/by 11:59PM EDT on July 29th for consideration and will be screened for appropriateness and suitability. Suggested topic categories include the Civilization series, strategy gaming, Sid's games more generally and the Civ community.

[Rob (R8XFT)]

Possibly the most inevitable question : is Civ 5 in the making?

[RedRalphWiggum]

and if so, when its going to be out?

[r_rolo1]

If/when there will be a SMAC II ( or atleast something close of it )

BTW nice work that of "capturing" Sid, Dan

[DanQ]

Originally Posted by r_rolo1

BTW nice work that of "capturing" Sid, Dan

On behalf of the show's team, why thank you.

[Roads]

Has any consideration been given to creating both a SP and MP version of Civ 5? SP surely suffers from MP needs and I suspect MP does as well. It seems obvious to me there are easily enough differences in methods of play to justify two games. To use one of the quotes you use in game, "if you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both."

[Pitman]

I'd like to know why SMAC/SMAX has been abandoned, when it was one of the highest rated 4X games ever. I'd like to see a new version of it, or something similar, how about it, Sid?

[Auditor]

When will, or will there be another SMAC type game?

[bestbrian]

Why, as in the case of BTS (most egregiously, but the whole CIV IV series), are the games shipped broken and bug-ridden? It's like the customer is a beta-tester, finding the bugs, posting them, and the fan community comes up with patches before the developers. So what's being done to improve the quality control so that the games can be played as intended "out of the box"? This just seems like a real poor way to run a railroad.

[mystikmind2005]

Hehehe, alot of people asking for smac!

The one thing that i have always wondered is why no game developers to date have bothered trying to match all of the brilliant game concepts found in smac??

[frog3]

Ask him if he is going to make another alpha centauri.

[r_rolo1]

A dime for Sid's thoughts about the infamous SoD issue and the way that it comes back, stronger than ever, in every game after Civ II

[BakingTheArt]

Are there any plans for Colonization on Mac?

[King Flevance]

Throw in another name asking for SMAC 2 just to be difficult.

1) Is there a reason the Civ series never went to a hexagon map?
2) Will Firaxis be working on X-Com's new sequel to be out? If not, does he know who will?
3) Will we be seeing any new strategy titles (outside of Civ/Colonization) coming out of Firaxis in the coming years?

EDIT:
4) I want to mirror stratos question about multi-layered worlds 2 posts below mine.

[Niptium]

Regarding Colonization, which is by far the game I have played the most in my life ever since I was 12 in 1995 (and I'm hoping that the franchise won't be left out in the cold for the next 14 years),
1-I'm wondering what was the motive behind leaving a potential fifth player (Portugal) out of the loop... again ?
2- And is there any chance that the colony screen might be changed before the game is shipped - because it looks a bit bland and unpersonalized to some (the original had building switching places from one colony to the other to create variety).

But I really, really want to take this chance to thank Firaxis for updating that fine historical simulation that Colonization is.

[UnnamedPlayer]

Why have you stuck to randomness in battles for so long? Can you at least make it optional so that the multiplayer isn't broken?

[Strato]

Originally Posted by r_rolo1

A dime for Sid's thoughts about the infamous SoD issue and the way that it comes back, stronger than ever, in every game after Civ II

I like that one.

My thoughts:

I think the SMAC2 stuff has been churdled over before in other interviews, right?? It seems to be a matter of ownership outside of Sid's control from memory.

Two possible questions:

1. Debrief - anything that Sid felt could have been done better, or implemented better after Civ IV BTS was released.

2. Any thoughts about going to the multi-layered world approach in future renditions of Civilization, as done in Civ II - Test of Time (eg: Midgard scenario).

[HaloTru7h]

Can we expect a real expansion pack for Civilization 4 sometime in the future? Or is the Civilization 4 series coming to a close after Civilization:Colonization?

If the latter is true, can we expect Civilization 5?

Also, is Asypr be working on Beyond the Sword for Mac OSX, or have you discussed it with them?

[RedTrotsky]

I'd like to ask how he could possibly choose Gamespy as the multiplayer platform for the PS3 version of CivRev with all the problems it has. And I'd like to ask him how hard his team is working to fix the multiplayer part of CivRev on all consoles (esp. PS3!). The forums are full of people complaining and with patch 1.1 things got even worse! When can we expect the multiplayer part of CivRev to work properly?

[dojoboy]

Sid,

(1) W/ the DS version of CivRev, was there ever any discussion of adding voice-activated features utilizing the mic? While on a run yesterday I thought that a Berserk unit promotion would be cool. When attacking, saying Hooah!, Yee-ha!, or Argh! into the mic would add an attack bonus.

(2) Is the Beta Centauri scenario in CivRev a cue to an upcoming Firaxis remake? You know we'd love to see a SMAC II in our lives.

Enjoying the game.