Development of CIvilization - Ask your questions

[Stervio]

Hi guys! My name is Pavel, I’m a screenwriter and video blogger. Currently I’m writing a book of development of some famous games of the past. There I’ll put my own interviews with key developers of some franchises.

Please, if you have any questions of development of Civilization 1-2 (as well as Colonization 1 and Railroad Tycoon 1-2), you may post here or PM. I know, there is already a lot of information on the web, but you may ask anything you didn’t find answer. Thank you!

 

[Mize]

Here's a couple, if you get to the original developers:
- Civ I appears to be intentionally shrunk in scale. Is this due to hardware limitations, because it would be boring if it was bigger, or both, or neither?
- How many people play-tested it while it was in development and how did they get feedback from players after release and react to it?

 

[rahorvat]

The one question that I would like to know is: Has Sid Meier been single programmer on the Civ1 project or have there been more.
The information/interviews that are on the internet say he has been the single programmer of the game, but some other sources say that later in the development other members of the MPS team also contributed?

Thanks

 

[rahorvat]

- Civ I appears to be intentionally shrunk in scale. Is this due to hardware limitations, because it would be boring if it was bigger, or both, or neither?

I saw the answer to this question somewhere. The answer was that with double sized map the game play was slower and boring due to the fact that you have to micro manage every unit and city. I also suspect that the memory constraints played some role in shrinking the map.

 

[cuc]

i. I want to hear about the thought process behind choosing Civ1/2's wonders, and behind Colonization's Founding Fathers.

Some more specific questions:

ii. Civ1:
A question for Sid.
It's interesting that the three sets of wonders have entirely different themes.
In particular, the "medieval" wonders are essentially the Great People system before it existed, and they are entirely devoted to characters who make up the founding myths of the modern world. What was behind this decision, instead of choosing actual architectural wonders?

iii. Colonization:
This is a question for Brian Reynolds.
It's noticeable that among the Founding Fathers, Adam Smith is the only one that lacks a direct connection to American colonization. It is also noticeable that Adam Smith would later be added as a wonder to Civ2.
Since in Sid Meier's Memoirs, Sid mentioned that he had not read any of Smith's writing, I have to infer that it is Brian who placed special importance on Smith. What is your thinking behind these choices?

iv. Civ2:
Again for Brian.
In Civ2, you are faced with the task to add 7 more wonders. While the last two of your additions are architectural landmarks in nature (Statue of Liberty & Eiffel Tower), the other 5 all followed the "Great People" theme.
What was your thought process behind these?

Your first 3 new wonders are particularly interesting, with Sun Tzu, Richard, and Marco Polo, since they have strayed from Sid's "Founding Myths of Modernity" theme. Were you trying to add more ancient/medieval figures, since in Civ1 there were none?
Why is "King Richard's Crusade" a production wonder? Is that its original effect, or has it been changed in development? Why is Cruaders a standard unit (unlocked by Monotheism), completely unrelated to the wonder?

v. Back to Civ1:
This is a question for every interviewee, though probably it will be fruitfully answered by Jeff Briggs.
Starting from CivNet, the game manual opens with a section on "Four Impulses of Civilization: Exploration, Economics, Knowledge, Conquest", describing the player's mission in a Civ game.

Who formulated this concept, based on what influences? Was it Jeff Briggs? Other than historians like Will Durant (cited in the Civ1 manual), is it an attempt to offer a more serious, more positive, less jokey expression of Alan Emrich's "4X"?

What do you think of the later fate of this "four impulses"?
- In Alpha Centauri and its marketing, they were rephrased and reordered as four verbs: Explore, Discover, Build, Conquer.
- The Civ3 manual opens with "Five Impulses of Civilization", adding a 5th impulse "Culture".
- Since Civ4, this concept has never been mentioned again.
- In the meanwhile, "4X" as a genre name has taken hold in the industry, its influence completely eclipsing the "four impulses".

Regardless of if it's intentional or not, what do you think of the difference between the two - instead of "Expand, Exploit", the Civ/SMAC version says "Discover, Build"?
You might be interested to hear that expansion-curtailing mechanics are a frequent topic of debate among players, and defenders of expansion often cite its inclusion as one X of "4X" as proof of its legitimacy, which would not happen with the Civ/SMAC version.

vi. Civ2:
I'm not sure if your interview plans include Michael Ely, but a producer role like Jeff Briggs might be able to answer too:
What unique content was made for the canceled Civilization Gold? In what year was it produced?
Are Civ2's wonder movies reused from Civ Gold?

 

[Marla_Singer]

Alright here are some questions.

According to Bruce Shelley (if I'm not mistaken), Sid Meier had a discussion with him about the game Empire that both had played. He asked him what would be the 10 things he would do to improve that game. Yet he hasn't told what was the 10 ideas he proposed and I would be curious to know if any of them made it to the final game of Civ1.

Civ1 was supposed to be played in real time (like Railroad Tycoon and SimCity) in the beginning of the development. Yet Sid Meier wasn't satisfied of it as it turned out that he felt like he was more watching the simulation than interacting with the game. I think, but I may be wrong, that this triggered the so-called "Valley of Despair" he mentions often. And ultimately he went back to the turn-based system of Empire which worked a lot better. Later on, Bruce Shelley will leave Microprose in 1992. He will join Microsoft where he will become director of Age of Empires, released in 1997. So I would be curious to know how much that idea to make of Civ an RTS game has matured into that story.

Also next question would be about Brian Reynolds. Apparently when Civ prototype was mature enough, it's been playtested by many people in Microprose who got hooked. Brian Reynolds was one of them and he proposed many ideas (adding that most were stupid). I would be interested to know what made Sid Meier curious about Brian Reynolds, who will eventually become the lead designer of Colonization (and later Civ2 and SMAC).

Another question to Brian Reynolds would be if he ever considered implementing Colonization mechanism in a game with Civilization scope (from 4000 BC to 2000 AD). By that I mostly mean having all the city population able to become units, but any other thing would would be interesting.

Oh and now that I think about it, Jeff Briggs is mentioned as a writer of Civ1, a co-designer/producer of Civ2, a co-founder of Firaxis with Meier and Reynolds, the lead designer of Civ3 (which he described himself as a team work), and ultimately the CEO of Firaxis before he left in 2006. Yet despite such activity, we don't really know a lot about his influence on the series. It's really difficult to find any interview of him. I would really be curious to know more.

 

[Civinator]

Minefields layed by Ironclads

In the German Civ 1 manual at page 172 stands, that one of the interesting settings, that didn´t make it over the final cut for the release of Civ 1 were minefields layed by ironclads. This was signed by Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley on 11.September 1991.

My question to both of them: How did those Ironclads layed these minefields and how did these minefields work?

 

[Mize]

Here's another one:
Does the AI sometimes have precognition of battle outcomes before it makes an attack?

It obviously knows its odds and uses them to decide whether to attack at all. Very much like a human would, it usually refrains from attacking strong defenders, but in certain situations it seems to know it's going to win, very much like a human save-scumming. Like a single tank killing three riflemen in a fort in one turn, while five other tanks are just circling the fort and not attacking. Or enemy battleships just following your carrier around, and then a cruiser sails in and sinks it.

 

[cuc]

Forgot about this question somehow:

Civ1:
Had art and music been created for the Turk leader Sulayman, before he was replaced by Frederick the Great?

 

[cuc]

Minefields layed by Ironclads
How did those Ironclads layed these minefields and how did these minefields work?

This is the paragraph from Sid Meier's Memoir! concerning the cut mines (it says "land mines", but I'd chalk up the difference to misremembering):

For a while, I tried to include land mines as a weapon, but I couldn't get the game's AI to place them intelligently, or to stop walking over their own mines, without dragging the processing speed to a crawl. Out they went.

So a Minefield kills the (naval) unit moving into it, regardless of faction. Presumably this process also removes the Minefield itself.

It sounds to me the Minefield was implemented as a Tile Improvement exclusive to water tiles, using the same system as land Improvements, thus incurring no additional memory cost.

 

[Civinator]

It sounds to me the Minefield was implemented as a Tile Improvement exclusive to water tiles, using the same system as land Improvements, thus incurring no additional memory cost.

If minefields would have been implemented as a special improvement for water tiles, that kills every unit in that tile, it would also kill the ironclad that has mined that tile and additionally, when set as a tile improvement by a "worker job", all water tiles could be filled with such mines, making movement by ships impossible.

May be it would have been more a mechanism, that the ironclads were able to carry and drop such a mine. This would limit the number of "worker mining jobs" compared to laying minefields as an improvement for water tiles.
So cuc, as it was very interesting for me to learn about the "land mines" in the Civilzation series by the report in Sid Meier's Memoir! , I think it still would be interesting to hear how this feature for "water mines" was set in Civ 1.

 

[cuc]

Seems to me the most important feature requiring additional code is that the Minefield should be visible only to the player placing it.

On reflection, I think it was more likely a unit (spawned by an Ironclad command) with several special traits like invisibility & immobility.

The "kills your own unit" part, I suspect is a misremembering, a consequence of him remembering them as land mines and attributing the cultural impression of land mines to them.

 

[cuc]

Were you trying to add more ancient/medieval figures, since in Civ1 there were none?

Re-reading the Civ2 manual's Designer's Notes, there is a paragraph on new wonders:

Wonders of the World were problematic for a different reason— traditionally they must come
in groups of seven! It just didn’t seem right to tack three wonders onto the end and talk about
the “10 Wonders of the Modern World.” We noticed, however, that most of our best ideas fit into
the two gaps between the existing time periods (between Ancient and Renaissance, or between
Renaissance and Modern). So we decided to split the original seven Renaissance wonders into
two periods and use our new ideas to bring each group up to a full seven, bringing us to
28 total Wonders.