IGN: Civilization's Past and Future, As Told By Its Lead Designers

[The_J]

IGN has just published an interview with some of the most important people in Civ history: Soren Johnson, Jon Shafer, Ed Beach and Anton Strenger, who each gave a bit of new direction for Civ.
They talk in the interview about how they started with Civ, their most-liked additions to Civ, and how they see Civ in the whole PC-game universe.

An excerpt:
"Shafer: "Civ is the history strategy game. There are certainly other games that could claim that. But given that Civ is 30 years old, and for many players it's the first historical strategy game they've ever played, and many never get deeper than that… I think the turn-based format makes it very approachable. Almost everybody has played chess, so it's very easy to wrap your head around. And then it grows in complexity. And I think that's a very unique selling point compared to other strategy games. You start from a very simple situation. It's very easy to jump into."

Read the whole interview here:
https://www.ign.com/articles/civilizations-past-and-future-as-told-by-its-lead-designers

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

Johnson: "...I also really soured on the bargaining table. I don't really think that's the best way to do diplomacy since it's super, super transactional. Where I think diplomacy should be very event-based."

Agreed

Beach: "So trade routes, you have to renew them quite often. So we've looked really hard at Civ 6 and poked at it… and we're trying to do that sort of self-assessment pretty often around here. So there are things from Civ 6 we're really going to want to look at as we go down the road."

Strenger: "I'd say trade routes…. there were some nuances that I either tried and didn't get in, or they did get in and didn't land.

Good. Trade Routes are high on my list of things I'd like to see improved (management-wise). It's too bad Strenger is gone. I'd like to see Trade Routes carrying resources in some fashion also.

 

[HorseshoeHermit]

I hope Shafer is doing well. Really.

I am made very happy by what I'm seeing from Strenger about diplomacy. It looks like what I would have said. Particularly, in contrast to what is said before it, about comparing to the Simulation games. I do not want character-based gameplay here. I want human history themed , geopolitics , grand strategy game. I am curious about what the shifts in gamer's appetites are, across like... all genres, and narrative + character stuff is more than half of my actually played games. But I know what the hole in my heart is that I fill with Civ.

All that said, I really respect Johnson's take on the "your Civ7" question. Again... Johnson is a genius, and I will be following him until he retires or I'm dead, pretty much. And if he makes a game *just* like that, taking Old World's success and pushing it even farther, I will not skim over it, no no.

... this piece makes me conscious of how my software skills are not where I'm proud, still. Great promotion of the IP as a career, in that way. Anyone else feel that?

 

[kaspergm]

Trade Routes are high on my list of things I'd like to see improved (management-wise). It's too bad Strenger is gone. I'd like to see Trade Routes carrying resources in some fashion also.

Trade Routes are arguably a bit of a sore point for Civ5 and Civ6, but also one where conflicts between realism, interesting ideas and micromanagement hit really hard.

I personally abhor the "mana from heaven" aspect of current trade routes: I send a trader from City A to City B, and magically a certain amount of food, production and/or gold appears at the origin city. WTH? I'd like a way to actually transfer food and/or production to another city, so you can have rural towns focusing on farming or mining and have these towns supply the basis for the population of your big urban centers once these grow, where instead the population work in districts to create gold, science, culture, etc. Hey, where did see something that plays into this? Oh yeah, City Lights mod ... Anyway, I think such a transfer should be completely decouple from actual "trade routes".

As for actual trade routes, yeah they should be linked to resources. Send a caravan loaded with Silk, Spices, or Incense, to city X, sell it for gold. Bring back Ivory and Dies bought for gold, to get happiness.

 

[MrRadar]

"and Anton Strenger, who was in the driver's seat for Civ 6's Rise and Fall and New Frontier DLCs – and while we couldn't get a word out of him about it, seems like the heir apparent to take over for Civilization 7, whenever that might happen."
Well, it looks like no word about that is forthcoming any more.

"Strenger: "I think diplomacy and the other leaders are, to me, it's my white whale for design. I'm like, there has to be a better way to do this. Because I kind of get frustrated when I'm playing single player. I feel like we've added rich personalities and abilities to counter against, but the other leaders still always feel like obstacles. I'm going to have to conquer you. So I feel like there's a richness to player-leader dynamics [playing against the AI] that could be explored. In multiplayer games, you have these text only non-aggression pacts and all the social richness like that. And how do we tap into some of that, like, sitting around the table with a board game dynamic, and put that into the [AI leaders] a bit more formally? That's something that's always been fascinating to me.""
Yes, there has to be a better way. How about looking back to Civ 4 and starting from there again? Diplomacy in Civ 4 feels, like, well, diplomacy. Everything turns around diplomacy and depends on it. And nothing is set in stone, unlike in Civ 6 where all diplomacy ends once you've signed a Declaration of Friendship.

"Johnson: "So I probably would be a pretty bad choice for that because I don't think I would be maximizing shareholder value. [laughs]"
I laugh together, but only to hide tears. "Maximizing shareholder value" most probably is what made Civ 6 the Frankenstein it is at the moment - the miserable monster whom this approach had created: a wretch, glued together from unfitting parts, bloated to the bursting point, infested with myriad of bugs throughout its lifetime and with no moment to spare in development to ever finish the polishing and making it user-friendly, and with no hope ever to have an adequate AI for it.

Johnson: "<...>So it's less about fiddling with tiles, more about playing with diplomacy and the resource system and doing interesting things with technology."
Oh, Soren, why can't you be the lead for Civ VII? Looking forward for the OW release on Steam, but I already want some continuation, like Medieval World, Enlightenment World, New World and so on. If Paradox can milk this like that, you could as well?

 

[SupremacyKing2]

Great article! The devs give lots of interesting insights into civ.

I like Johnson's idea of regions instead of hexes. I think regions could add a lot of benefits to civ. They would be a natural way to divide the map and determine borders. Regions would do away with the problem of borders expanding hex by hex and empires being a weird patch of disconnected areas until the mid game. Also, regions could allow for quicker gameplay. Instead of taking 5 turns to move your settler to the right location, you could just move it to the adjacent region in 1 turn. And I think it would fit the historical timescale better too. Now, when a turn represents 10 years, you did not take 30 years just to take 1 city but you conquered an entire region. Plus, regions are how the world is divided because they are a natural way to administer people. So having regions on the map that the player could administer (decide what to build, manage pop happiness, etc) makes sense. That is probably why "simulation" games like Europe Universalis or Imperator: Rome use regions. The world is actually not hexes. Hexes are more for "board games" because they are a great way for units to move in consistent directions and distances.

I also like the idea of trade routes being actual trade of resources instead of the free food or free gold out of nothing. I think if you make trade routes with actual resources, it would make trade much more historical and interesting. In the real world, trade routes were all about getting access to important resources.

I also hope we see better diplomacy too. civ6 diplomacy is basically just responding to AI trade offers (and usually saying no). I think diplomacy needs to be more conversational and event based. Also, the personalities of the civ leaders needs to come through in the diplomacy. I want to see more geopolitics where leaders make decisions based on national interests.

 

[Zaarin]

I like Johnson's idea of regions instead of hexes. I think regions could add a lot of benefits to civ. They would be a natural way to divide the map and determine borders. Regions would do away with the problem of borders expanding hex by hex and empires being a weird patch of disconnected areas until the mid game.

I grant the advantages you suggest, but I still strongly dislike regions in Endless Legends and Humankind.

Plus, regions are how the world is divided because they are a natural way to administer people.

Are they, though? Most administrative regions have arbitrary borders (see all the square or almost square states in the Western United States), and they often change when someone new comes to power.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I grant the advantages you suggest, but I still strongly dislike regions in Endless Legends and Humankind.

Fair enough. Personally, I like the regions in EL and HK.

I forgot to mention that if civ used regions, I think players should be able to customize the size and number of regions per map size in the game settings. Some players might prefer lots of small regions if they want a "hex" like game and wanted more micromanagement. Other players could have fewer, larger regions if they wanted a quicker game.

Are they, though? Most administrative regions have arbitrary borders (see all the square or almost square states in the Western United States), and they often change when someone new comes to power.

Yeah, I think so. Yes, the borders might be arbitrary but it is a natural way to administer people. You can draw an area and have some sort of government that is in charge of everything inside that area.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I thought Shafer's civ7 response was interesting:

Shafer: "We would definitely do a lot with characters. Like I said, I think that's where there's a lot of fertile ground to explore. I would love to just chop off the second half of the game. That would be so amazing. It's always so hard to make that second half challenging and dynamic. 4X games are so much about momentum. But nailing that pacing where you're strong enough to succeed but not too strong to make the game too easy and boring for yourself, it's just so difficult. So if I had complete control and didn't have to worry about what anybody thought, I would just remove the second half… but at that point, is it really Civ anymore? Maybe not. So maybe the right answer is to step back and try to do things in a simpler way, and focus on the [player] decisions that matter the most."

I am not sure chopping off the second half of the game would still be civ since we think of civ as going from bronze age to future age. But maybe it could work. Maybe you could have a civ game that only goes from the bronze age to the end of the middle age that was amazing because it was much more focused on building a great empire with no boring or dull parts. It would probably depend on the victory conditions. But if you've built a great empire and accomplished the victory conditions, do you really need to keep playing another 600 years? Probably not. I certainly get why he wants to chop off the second half because the second half of civ has notoriously been boring and a dredge to get through.

I do like his idea of simplifying civ. I think civ6 has gotten rather bloated. I think it would be better for civ7 to try to really focus on the essentials of what makes civ fun. IMO, it's better to have a simpler game that is deep than a complex game that is shallow. Just look at chess as a perfect example of a simple game in terms of rules but very deep in terms of strategy and tactics.

 

[Bactrian]

Yeah, I think so. Yes, the borders might be arbitrary but it is a natural way to administer people. You can draw an area and have some sort of government that is in charge of everything inside that area.

This has not been true in every time and every place in human history. Many states have had overlapping and even competing systems of governance, with complex relationships to territory. The Ottoman system, for example, governed imperial subjects loosely through governors and much more immediately through a confessional system that was largely de-territorialized. A free city in the HRE, for example, was under the direct rule of the emperor even if it was situated within the lands of some other authority. Moreover, at no time in human history (including today) has authority extended evenly across the landscape; I like how Civ's territory expands more quickly along rivers and into fertile areas and more slowly through forests and mountains.

 

[Urlance Woolsbane]

I grant the advantages you suggest, but I still strongly dislike regions in Endless Legends and Humankind.

I've not played EL or Humankind, so correct me if I'm wrong, but they use hexagonal tiles, right? That's the impression I get based on screenshots I've seen of them. I think that Soren is referring instead to the sort of regions that Paradox games use, where each one is effectively a node, connected to an arbitrary number of other regions, in contrast to the rigid grid of tiles used by Civ

 

[Kaan Boztepe]

nice chat . good insight about why they did things in their respective games. shaefer and sorensen afterall released their civ clones exactly the way they said in that interview they wanted it. too bad anton and ed were not as forth coming with their ideas for civ7.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

I've not played EL or Humankind, so correct me if I'm wrong, but they use hexagonal tiles, right? That's the impression I get based on screenshots I've seen of them. I think that Soren is referring instead to the sort of regions that Paradox games use, where each one is effectively a node, connected to an arbitrary number of other regions, in contrast to the rigid grid of tiles used by Civ

Yeah. EL and Humankind still uses hexes. They just "group" the hexes into regions for the purpose of borders and setting limits on number of cities since you can only have 1 city per region. Johnson was likely referring to Paradox style regions where there no hexes and you move from region to region. I think both styles of regions could work for civ. Humankind, being a civ like game, shows us what hexes+regions could look like in a civ game and I think it works well. You still have hexes for movement but regions make borders better and prevent city spamming. But I think Paradox style regions could also work for civ.

 

[Linklite]

Are they, though? Most administrative regions have arbitrary borders (see all the square or almost square states in the Western United States), and they often change when someone new comes to power.

I think the US is the exception to the rule rather than the rule, though. The benefit of planned building. Most, at least from what I've seen, are not completely arbitrary, but defined how historic realms were defined, usually by things like rivers, mountains and other geographic features that made it easier to defend, or at least recognise where the line was. Since the person designing the Earth evidently didn't have access to ruler, thsoe rarely conveniently fall in nice geometric shapes. I'm not sure the UK even knows what a straight-line even is.

 

[kaspergm]

I grant the advantages you suggest, but I still strongly dislike regions in Endless Legends and Humankind.

I kind of agree with you - at least, my enthusiasm towards regions cooled somewhat after trying Humankind. I still think the idea of regions has some interesting prospects, but it would also require a lot of thinking about how to succesfully implement it into a civ context.

One benefit of regions as I see it would be to move away from the static and somewhat arbitrary idea that a city can work hexes up to exactly a distance of three from the city center. That seems somewhat illogical. I was not at all a fan about how districts worked in Humankind, but the fact that you could have a region where you place an urban center - around which you would place your speciality districts - and then in other parts of the same region, you could have farming areas or mining areas to provide food and production to the city is one I think holds a lot of value. Again, this would be sort of playing into the ideas of City Lights' rural districts, but without the same limitations, so each region could have one "urban" center and multiple rural centers providing for the urban center (instead of having towns that specialize solely as rural, as is the case in City Lights).

 

[MrRadar]

Before considering individual tiles vs regions, I'd like that they go back and consider borders and territory as a possible starting point.

I think that up to and including Civ III the concept of borders and territory was evolving quite well, with Civ III having even Right of Passage agreements, which, of course, could be abused at the cost of ruining your diplomatic reputation completely. And the fact that other AI's units could enter your territory without any agreements just to cross somewhere else was more realistic than the force field borders and teleportation which appeared in Civ IV and persist to this day, rather hurting the gameplay.

AI would need more sensible logic than cultists currently have or than Civ III units had, where AI could declare war on you automatically just because they tried to move onto a tile with your unit on it while they were only trudging by to some mysterious goal across your territory.

Earlier human history was full of vague borders, raids and skirmishes that might have provoked retaliatory raids but not always meant a full scale war. Borders solidified into force fields relatively recently. Here, I think it would be interesting to explore deeper the cold war concept that Amplitude has. And also drop that crutch of guaranteed 10 turns of peace or so, it only leads into all kinds of exploits, but go back to more realistic Civ III approach where peace is signed until war is redeclared, be it on the same turn. Just write some more sensible code for the AI. Coding a solid diplomatic system for a Civ game should be one of the most important things. Civ VI really dropped the ball in this respect.

But to come back to territorial matters, I preferred Civ IV concept of territory=cultural influence concept which seemed more natural than expansion 1 tile at a time, however I think that at some point in time those fluent borders should stop moving and become fixed, if between two nations, as if switching from Civ IV model to Civ V/VI, let's say at the discovery of Nationalism or maybe later, with cultural pressure continuing however, and thus potentially creating further border tensions, loyalty issues and explosive situations.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

nice chat . good insight about why they did things in their respective games. shaefer and sorensen afterall released their civ clones exactly the way they said in that interview they wanted it. too bad anton and ed were not as forth coming with their ideas for civ7.

Well Anton just left Firaxis at the beginning of the month. So any ideas that he had right now wouldn't really matter anymore.

 

[Zaarin]

I've not played EL or Humankind, so correct me if I'm wrong, but they use hexagonal tiles, right? That's the impression I get based on screenshots I've seen of them. I think that Soren is referring instead to the sort of regions that Paradox games use, where each one is effectively a node, connected to an arbitrary number of other regions, in contrast to the rigid grid of tiles used by Civ

As SupremacyKing2 pointed out, EL and HK have hexes, yes, but settlement is divided into regions--you can't just settle anywhere. To me it is very strange that the map is divided up into regions before there is anyone to decide why that should be the case. Granted, HK's anemic system of expansion also leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

I think the US is the exception to the rule rather than the rule, though. The benefit of planned building. Most, at least from what I've seen, are not completely arbitrary, but defined how historic realms were defined, usually by things like rivers, mountains and other geographic features that made it easier to defend, or at least recognise where the line was. Since the person designing the Earth evidently didn't have access to ruler, thsoe rarely conveniently fall in nice geometric shapes. I'm not sure the UK even knows what a straight-line even is.

Oh, the UK knows what a straight line is. Just look at Africa. Yes, natural features often define borders, but just as often they don't. Borders come and go with the empires that make them; having them present from the start of the game feels like an exercise in absurdity to me.

One benefit of regions as I see it would be to move away from the static and somewhat arbitrary idea that a city can work hexes up to exactly a distance of three from the city center. That seems somewhat illogical. I was not at all a fan about how districts worked in Humankind, but the fact that you could have a region where you place an urban center - around which you would place your speciality districts - and then in other parts of the same region, you could have farming areas or mining areas to provide food and production to the city is one I think holds a lot of value. Again, this would be sort of playing into the ideas of City Lights' rural districts, but without the same limitations, so each region could have one "urban" center and multiple rural centers providing for the urban center (instead of having towns that specialize solely as rural, as is the case in City Lights).

I do agree with this. I particularly like HK's use of Hamlets to establish additional "city centers."

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I will say that Ed's remark that he was not happy that civs developed into having extensive lists of bonuses probably indicates where Civ VII is going, design-wise. It sounds like civs in Civ VII will have fewer, but more potent bonuses, and probably rely even more on unique infrastructures and units.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

I will say that Ed's remark that he was not happy that civs developed into having extensive lists of bonuses probably indicates where Civ VII is going, design-wise. It sounds like civs in Civ VII will have fewer, but more potent bonuses, and probably rely even more on unique infrastructures and units.

I'm fine with that honestly.
The Maori come to mind when I think about that. As fun as they are their civ ability has so many components to them that it's hard to keep track of it all.

My wish is that hopefully each leader will either come with their own unique unit or infrastructure, in addition to the civ's unique unit and unique infrastructure, therefore just putting in more leader bonuses into them.