Here's a german interview. I'll wrote a protocol. There are a few new infos I think (highlighted in bold type):
One unit per tile and AI problems: what are your solutions?
- Ed made unit AI for civ V. He knows about the problems. Corps and Armies helped in VI. Commanders are helping the AI in VII (and the player). Ed didn’t like the stacks in IV. He thought its confusing to find out who is fighting against whom. He preferred tactical combat. VII would be best of both worlds. It’s as easy as IV to move around, but as deep as V and VI tactically.
- New commanders in each age. They will reduce micromanagement a lot.
How about modern tutorials, good tooltips, onboarding? Is it less complicated but has the same complexity as before?
- Five principles in development: one was depth instead of complexity. For example, each bonus should be easy to understand with 1 line of text. It’s easier to learn and rewarding.
- Carl designed many civs
- Each civ has a unique civic tree. They start with an easy to comprehend bonus, but then the other bonuses come one at a time. Timing and order are in the player’s hand.
- Learning about when to build builders and how to use them best was very complex. Population management was also very complex, especially for new players. The new system brings more depth, but less complexity.
- There will still be micromanagement for players that want to have it. For example, in the new resource system. Assigning resources to cities is comparable to population management, just with resources.
Builders as an example how hard it is to have a mechanic that’s fun in early and late game. WB missed the builders in the beginning when playing civ VII, while he didn’t like it in late game civ VI.They acknowledge that sometimes what is appropriate in the early game should be different in the late game.
- One example in civ VII are trade routes. They can’t go into details how these work in the later ages. There are merchants in all three ages, but what they do and how they create trade routes will change throughout the ages. They enjoyed to incorporate a similar feeling of changing the map that people previously had with builders into merchants. Ed likes to think of merchants as people that explore the world for trade opportunities. It’s the Marco Polo feeling of going out and creating the Silk road. The merchant is a unit that contains some feel of the builder.
- In the beginning the merchant is sent out and he needs to go tile by tile to find a city with which he can start a trade route. There is less automation in trade routes compared to civ VI. It’s a step-by-step feeling of trade.
- Resource trade and trade routes are merged. They are no longer separate parts of the game. Ed believes it is fun to send the trader around the map towards their destination.
WB finishes his matches, he shows late game content on Twitch and YouTube. But there are way too many clicks in civ VI. Now there are crises and a new beginning. How does this work? How can you manage that the player gets new sensations but is rewarded for gaining advantages in the previous age?
- They have wrestled with these questions. What happens in the transition? What you take with you and what gets simplified had gotten the most attention and rework during development. They tried different variants to make sure that you keep what you can be proud of and that you are not too disrupted by the transition.
- On the recent live stream, they showed some impressions and what happens.
- Everything on the map stays. You don’t lose cities or buildings, the commanders also stay around. And then there is the legacy system itself. You are getting rewards for what you’ve accomplished. You gain points for your achievements in the previous era that you can spend on bonuses for the next one.
- If you are ahead in culture, you will probably stay ahead in culture if you spend the points on culture.
Multiplayers are worried that games will not be epic, because there aren’t enough players on the map. What can multiplayers expect?Multiplayer has been a big focus. The direction is not less epic, but more epic.
- Multiplayers benefits from the three ages. Each age can be played as a standalone in multiplayer, which makes for a more practicable game duration. You have all the empires that were on the heights of their power during that each that knock their heads against each other.
- They also thought about how it would work if players start in later eras. You can’t just start with a single settler and a unit. Players need different tools. They came up with a new system how players can prepare their empire. They have never shown that nor talked about it in detail. But it is a great system to assure a great start in a multiplayer game that start in the later ages.
- There is currently a smaller player count when players want to play all three ages together. All players start on the same continent to great a competition. There will be support for numbers of players as we are used to during development, e.g., 8 players.
- Ed thinks that multiplayer won’t be less epic, he believes the multiplayer community will take off.
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