Gameplay Elements in Civilization Revolution: Podcast Transcript

[Intro Music]

Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to the 2nd Episode of the Civilization Revolution Podcast, I’m Elizabeth Tobey, community manager here at 2K and today I’m at Firaxis to talk about their latest game, coming out this spring. Today we’re going to be focusing on new gameplay elements in Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution.

But before we get started on that, let’s introduce our guests. How about you guys all say your names, and tell me a little about yourselves and what you’ve been working on the for the project.

Scott Lewis: I’m Scott Lewis. I’m the interface design guy and I work on the interface stuff with Sid. Sid yells at me a lot and tells me what to do.

Jake Solomon: Yeah I second that. I’m Jake Solomon, I’m a junior programmer and I do whatever Sid tells me to because he’s vicious. If you do not obey.

[laughter]

[0:57]
Sid Meier: I’m Sid Meier and I’m the designer of this project. I don’t care what anybody says, **** these two.

Elizabeth Tobey: All right, so to talk about Civ Revolution. This is a much faster game than any Civ game in the past. Can you talk about how you accomplished that and what it brings to this new version?

[1:15]
Scott Lewis: What I think part of the plan is, and Sid can speak better to this, is that we didn’t want to lose any of the depth. So we didn’t take out anything that would make the game any shallower or simpler. But we streamlined it and made it all come at you a lot faster. You’re not controlling nearly as many cities as you have in Civs before, but you still have four or five. So there’s still a lot of depth in terms of research and combat and city management and everything that you’re used to in Civ games. But it just comes at you a lot faster, the game just moves very quickly.

Sid Meier: I’ve heard a gamer refer to it as Civ on steroids. Not that we endorse steroids, but the pace of the game is really increased. You are doing lots of things simultaneously, you’re exploring, you’re building cities, you’re negotiating with other leaders. The world is a world you can explore quickly, you run into leaders very quickly. That was one of our design goals: to bring you into contact with other leaders very quickly so that you are at the negotiating/diplomacy part of the game. That’s really the fun thing. We took a look at what was the most fun and made sure there was a lot of that going on. We took a look at what was least fun, and made sure there was not a lot of that going on.

[2:30]
Elizabeth Tobey: I know that this is a difficult and varied question, but about how long does it take to finish a single player game of Civ?

Jake Solomon: Under three hours generally, right?

Sid Meier: It really depends on your play style. I’ve played games where I’ve focused on one city and turtled and built it up as cool as it could be, and those games can go by very quickly. If you are in a big military campaign - you’re fighting everyone on the map – you’ve got units going everywhere and you are thinking carefully about every move. It could take hours. So it’s really dependant on your play style. But over it’s really it’s a fast moving game.

Jake Solomon: Mine last about seven to ten minutes.

[laughter] “That’s cause you’re awful!”

Sid Meier: If you leave your capitol undefended, which is kind of one of Jake’s strategies, it could be over in five to ten minutes.

Jake Solomon: Oddly enough not very successful. But I did try it.

[3:25]
Elizabeth Tobey: About victory conditions: They’re different and more varied than in previously Civilization games. Can you talk a little bit more about what they are and what they bring to the game?

Sid Meier: One of the things that the variety of victory conditions brings to the game is not knowing who is going to win until the game is almost over. Like there’s not this sense of inevitability. There’s not one Civ who is clearly going to win because they are the most powerful. You could be the most powerful but someone else might have this great technology and they’re building this spaceship to take it to Alpha Centauri and they’re going to win the technology victory. Or they have a lot of money and they’re going to win the economic victory. So, the game is really up in the air until almost the last minute and the various victory conditions allow you to really do that. If you discover you are going after one type of victory but ‘oops’ you run into a civ that’s kinda beating you in that direction you can change course and go in a different direction. The game is really never over until the very end.

Jake Solomon: Yeah, and that’s definitely true and we’ve seen that play out. We spent a lot of time on that to make sure the game is always very fast paced, up to the end. I mean, they get faster at the very end. And every victory condition has a wonder you have to build to succeed and that’s different from previous Civs. So if you’re going for an economic condition, you have to build a specific wonder, like the spaceship if you are going for technology victory. So there are a lot of things different about the victory conditions in this Civ.

[4:47]
Scott Lewis: The wonder you have to build for Domination is Bomber Armies.

Jake Solomon: Bomber Armies, yes. And the nuke.

Sid Meier: And having to build a wonder makes you a little vulnerable. You could lose that city that’s building the wonder and you know then you have to start over again. So there’s a tension. Even if you are close to victory, there’s a way the other Civs can kind of stop you and so you’ve really got to be on your toes until the very end of the game. We actually put a lot of work into making sure each of the victories is pro-active. Military victory, obviously there’s a lot to do there. But with the Economic victory, there are these milestones you can reach which give you special abilities. You can steal money from other Civilizations. For the Cultural victory, which is dependant on getting a lot of Great People, you have to protect those people, because a spy could come and steal your Great Person and all of a sudden you are one step further away from your Cultural Victory. So the victory conditions aren’t static, they’re dynamic and there are proactive ways to strategize how to achieve that victory and there are also things you can do to stop someone else from getting a victory. So there is a very dynamic game with all the different victory conditions in play.

Jake Solomon: Yah, that’s one of the most fun things about Civ Revolution. You are definitely not in isolation while you’re playing the game. I mean, if someone gets ahead of you we have lots of things built in to where you can snag control back. Like Sid said with the spies stealing people or just knowing where a particular city is that’s building something, you have a city now to focus on to destroy if you need to. As a last resort, you can slow that person down. So there are a lot of things you can do and that’s probably one of the most fun things.

[6:22]
Elizabeth Tobey: And just to kind of piggy back on that, you can easily track other people’s victory progress as well?

Sid Meier: That was actually a dramatic change to the game. We were actually about halfway through development and we kinda sat down and said “The first half of the game is a lot of fun, it’s exciting to explore and to discover what’s gong on. But the second half of the game is kinda eh.” And we realized it was because you didn’t know where you stood in regard to other players. That didn’t have that kind of constant picture in your mind. “Oh, this guy’s ahead of me over here; Cleopatra, she’s working this angle…” But just exposing that information to the player - what are you good at, what are you not so good at, who’s ahead of you in this category - added an excitement and tension to the game that wasn’t there before. So by, as you say, letting the player know where they stand in the different categories it just adds a whole new dimension of tension and strategic thinking to the second half of the game. And that creates this really exciting rush to the finish line.

[7:31]
Elizabeth Tobey: Switching gears a little bit, let’s talk about online matching and online gameplay across the different platforms. This is something that I think is a lot more accessible to gamers that hasn’t really been there in previous Civs. Can you explain what’s different about online gameplay now?

Jake Solomon: No.

[laughter]

Scott Lewis: We don’t believe in online gameplay.

Jake Solomon: Whoa, this game’s online, I dunno about that!

Sid Meier: It’s a hoax.

Scott Lewis: The internet is certainly a hoax.

Jake Solomon: We’re waiting for that whole ‘internet thing’ to pan out. We’re not going to dip our toes in that. Ew.

Scott Lewis: Yeah, that’s for the bleeding edge people.

[8:03]
Sid Meier: Online play is really a new dimension in Civ Revolution. We’re approaching it in a new way that I really think is going to be pretty exciting for players. The game plays in simultaneous turns, so you’re not waiting for other players to play their turns, you are all kinda doing things at the same time. We have scenarios, we have ways that the game can be played in a shorter amount of time and that’s your choice. We have hot-joining, which means that if someone drops out another player could come in or the same player could come back. The games are designed to be stable and able to be finished. That’s always a challenge with a game that takes a bit of time to play, how to do you get everyone to stick around until the end? Given the pace of the game, the one more turn aspect, there’s always something cool happening. So, I really think this is going to be an exciting multiplayer gaming experience. With the addition of ladders and rankings and achievements and the kinds of cool parts of the community that draw people into gaming online, I think it will be a really fun experience. Plus we have a brand new feature, which is the “Game of the Week”. Which is something for single player players, people who like to play in single player mode. You can still be part of the community by downloading the Game of the Week, which means they are playing the exact same map, exact same initial situation as everyone else playing the game of the week. And then they can use their best strategy, play the map as many times as they want, and post their best score online and every week there’ll be one “World’s Greatest Civ Player.” That will be pretty cool to be that person.

[9:42]
Elizabeth Tobey: For newcomers to Civilization, how would you explain the different areas of this game, especially with the new areas of Civilization. You build cities, you research technology, you dominate the world… how do you balance all these things in the game and how do they work?

Jake Solomon: Balance?

[laughter]

Sid Meier: Balance, shamalance.

Sid Meier: Civilization has always taken the approach of putting you in the position of the leader. You don’t make all the little tiny decisions, you are the big picture person. You guide this civilization through thousands of years of history. That’s the really the story behind Civ. You are the King, you are in Charge, you make a brand new history for the world. Civ Revolution is based around that idea. You do important things. You discover new technology, you found new cities, you decide who is your friend and who is your enemy. You decide who you’re going to war with, you decide what units to build, when do we attack, when do we defend. You are in charge of the big picture. You negotiate with other leaders who pop up on the screen and interact with you. You decide is this a person I can trust and trade technologies. You’re the King, basically, and that’s the idea behind the game. I think everyone can relate to that, everyone knows it might be good to have gunpowder, it might be good to have some electricity, a big army could be handy in certain situations, so the ideas of the game are very familiar, but you get to take that raw material and create a history of all you own unique story.

Jake Solomon: And it’s fun. You know, it’s very popular to talk about “Open World” and how open-ended the game play is, but I promise you, Civ is as open-ended of a game as you are going to experience on the consoles. We’ve built this game to allow you to do really whatever you want, and there is no real linear nature to the game play. You can choose to proceed. If you don’t want to kill everybody, you absolutely completely don’t have to. We have three other victory conditions which don’t involve that. But if you do want kill everybody, we fully support it. We give you Nukes, for that exact purpose.

[laughter]

But it really is, when people talk about open-ended game play, I really think Civ is the– you get to write history. You get to do whatever you want and I think we have the most open ended game play out there.

[12:05]
Scott Lewis: In terms of getting new players into it, I think Civ is one of the best games at starting really small and getting larger & larger. Keeping the player along with it. You start out with one unit and then you get two, and things start evolving and changing and growing. And you get more choices and more choices and more involvement. It just naturally blossoms from this little first city, little settlement, to your whole Civilization with armies.

Sid Meier: What’s exciting is that every game is completely different. And when you sit down, you look at that first unit you are wondering “What’s going to happen this time? What is the World going to look like? Who am I going to run into?” And that’s what keeps you going: to see what the next chapter of the story looks like or what’s the next thing that’s going to happen.

Jake Solomon: Yeah, the leaders that you play against are different every time. The French are going to act different every time. The maps that you are playing on are going to be different every time. So your strategy is going to be different every time. The techs you get, all these different things that happen, are going to be different every time. You’re not ever going to play the same game of Civ – it just is not possible. That’s what’s so fun about the game.

[13:07]
Elizabeth Tobey: Let’s talk about workers, resources and production in the game. This helps you grow your city, expand your civilization… How does this change from Civilizations in the past? In Civilization Revolution, how do workers and resources work?

Sid Meier: We’ve actually applied a new philosophy this game: That everything is good. It’s all good. Everything you do helps you some way or another. But some things help you more in certain situations. So, workers go out and collect things like food to help you grow, or resources to help you build things. Trade, which you can turn into scientific discoveries or money. And those are all positive things. There is no maintenance, no corruption, there’s no ugly negative things. Your Civ is always growing, always expanding, always getting better and cooler. Your strategy is basically how to make that happen as quickly as possible and appropriately based on your strategy and what else you are running into in the world. Cities are kind of like your engine of your Civ. That’s where you make things, where you discover new things, where your people are, where you develop culture, where your great people appear that help you do very special helpful cool things, where you build Wonders that have incredible new powers that you’ve never before seen in Civilization. It’s really the engine that drives your game. Building of cities and use of workers to help those cities grow and produce things.

Scott Lewis: There’s also special resources that are unlocked by technologies that entice you to go make a long term play. Like you see Uranium or something like that which you’re not going to be able to use for a few thousand years, and do you plant a city near that knowing that in 2000 AD it will be very useful? There’s a lot of cool decisions there to be made and how that affects what technologies you research and what your approach to the game is really affected by that.

Jake Solomon: And we haven’t taken out really any of the depth of cities, because if you want to, we do give you complete control. You can hand pick your workers and put them wherever you want. We’ve also designed the game so that’s not necessary if you don’t want to do that, so that’s not necessary. But if you do want that kind of control, and people do, that is there for you.

Sid Meier: Jake has designed an incredible city screen to make this all intuitive and obvious and very easy to manage.

Jake Solomon: Yes, the greatest city screen ever made.

[laughter]

Scott Lewis: I designed the first three, and then Jake got it.

Jake Solomon: Changed one little thing.

Sid Meier: And Scott has perfected it. Scott mentioned some of the decisions. A lot of the decisions in Civ have that sort of long term/short term quality. Do I do this which is kind of planning for the future or do I do something that helps me right away? The Great People are a great example of this. If you get some scientist, you can use him to finish the research you are working on right now. You can get gunpowder right like that. Or you can settle him in a city, and from then on to the rest of the game he will add 50% to your science that you generated, so that’s more of a long term commitment. A lot of the decisions in the game have this long-term/short-term aspect. There are a lot of really cool decisions to be made in Civilization, and there are all different. Maybe next time I go a different way, maybe I try something different. It plants the seed of wanting to play this game again and try something different. So there are a lot of cool decisions to make this game.

[16:33]
Elizabeth Tobey: You just mentioned Great People, and that’s a huge new element to this game. Can you talk more about them, what they do, how you can use them and how they vary throughout the game?

Scott Lewis: Well, it mainly came from Dostoevsky –

Jake Solomon: They’re awesome, Great People are a blast. And like Sid said –

Scott Lewis: Now you’re just changing the topic.

Jake Solomon: What’s that?

[laughter]

Jake Solomon: Go ahead, take control, talk about whatever you want, this is your time.

Jake Solomon: Great people are a lot of fun, because when you get Great People, based on the culture your cities are producing, and you get more and more Great People, Great People like Sid said, have two sides to them. You can either use their, what we call their Superpower immediately, and use up that Great Person. And they have a lot of really cool super bonuses, like you can flip an enemy city to your control just by using a Great Person. Or you can steal gold, or you can, as Sid said, complete a tech right away. But they’ve also got a cool thing, where if you want to, you can strategically put Great People in different cities, and then they will offer a long term continuous benefit. I’m very greedy so I’m always like “POP”. I always want to use them right away, but they also have strategic benefits, as well.

Sid Meier: And they interact with spies, because spies can steal Great People from other Civs and bring them over to your civilization, so there’s a chance that even if you plant a Great Person in one of your cities the story isn’t over yet. You have to protect that person and make sure a spy doesn’t come in there and steal it. And Great People are an important part to a cultural victory. They are very valuable as parts of the game. So they add a new dimension and they’re fun. It’s fun to know you’ve got Einstein or Henry Ford in your Civilization. And when you see them in the cities, there’s a flag on one of your houses: “This is where Henry Ford lives.” So you actually have those people as a part of your civilization.

[18:30]
Elizabeth Tobey: Combat, which I know that you love, is pretty interesting in this game and it’s more interactive than before. So, how does that work, how is it new, how is it more interactive?

Sid Meier: We had a couple design goals. We knew with Civ Revolution that we were going to make it graphically awesome. With the next gen consoles that was basically a given. And we wanted combat to be one of the places where the game would really shine. It’s key to the game, it’s tense, it’s exciting. We put a lot of energy into animations, and special effects in combat. We wanted to have it be something where there was tension. Where you didn’t really know until the end of combat who was going to win, who was going to lose. All your units have multiple figures in them, so you might lose one guy but you could still win the combat. It was a place for us to show off our physics and our special effects, so you’re hit by a cannonball you go flying. There are different effects to show who’s winning and who’s losing in combat. Plus we added the new interactive feature where you can retreat from combat, if you decide its not going the way you like it to.

Jake Solomon: Never! Never retreat!

Sid Meier: And it really helps to highlight some of those cool moments of Civ, where your bomber takes on your enemy’s archers. These situation where you’ve got the cool technology, you don’t just know it intellectually you see it on the screen where the bomber is just blowing things up. Or your tank, or whatever. So, it really helps to reinforce those cool Civ moments where you get the payoff for technology that you invested in or the army you built.

Jake Solomon: Yeah, that’s a big thing. The combat is not iconic anymore. All your figures are there on screen, so as you watch combat you will see your guys either dying or killing the enemy. So every combat is – and we’ve seen hundreds of combats at this point – fun to watch. Because, one, you still have the option to retreat from battle, so you’ve always got to watch the combat. But also, as well, all your figures are onscreen with the way the battle plays out, and there’s nothing canned its different every time, so you’ve got to watch the combat to see what’s happening.

Sid Meier: We’ve added the heal feature, now, where if your unit was damaged in combat you can use up its next entire turn to heal and bring back some of those units. So it’s always a decision: Do I go into battle with this slightly damaged unit or do I wait a turn and heal it and then go into battle? You’ve got a lot of these decisions to make, where there’s a lot of tension when you go into battle. Did I make the right decision going into battle now as opposed to going into battle later with a stronger unit? All sorts of cool stuff going on.

Jake Solomon: And the unit upgrades play into a lot. Because we’ve got a lot of different unit upgrades. But based on what unit upgrade your unit may have, guerilla or engineer or infiltration, it’s got all these different combat bonuses. So not only will the unit’s uniform will change depending on what upgrades it has, but the way it fights in combat and how much stronger it will be also be represented in combat, so that’s fun too.

Sid Meier: And we give you a preview, before you go into combat, it will show you exactly what advantages you have going into combat. You know you’re attacking from a hill plus you’ve got the infiltration bonus versus what advantages the defender might have. So you can look at those odds and say you know exactly what’s going on, so it’s not some random thing happening there. You see the odds before going into combat before you make the decision.

Scott Lewis: There’s also overrunning. Like if you – the classical problem with Civ games is when you have someone’s spearmen beating a tank and when you have grossly uneven odds.

Jake Solomon: Yeah, that ain’t going to happen anymore. That’s like one of the best parts: the overrun.

Scott Lewis: People are just screaming and running away. It’s like “AAAAH!”

Jake Solomon: It’s awesome.

[22:18]
Elizabeth Tobey: For our last question, this is a little bit more interface related. But, Civilization was made for the mouse and keyboard. How did you guys adapt it to work with a controller? And how did you make that really feel natural when it comes to platforms like the DS or the PS3 and 360?

Scott Lewis: When I started on the project, I just noted from playing with Sid’s prototype that he made that he made the game really kinetic. Every moment he just gives you another unit or another something to do. So move this guy and now move this guy and move this guy. And you are just sort of pulled along in the game and it feels very natural. Making a console interface for that has been pretty easy, because he did most of the, well he did all the framework of how the game flows and how the game works. Just having the move made some concessions, like having the workers and looking around the map and so forth, but really I think it’s a better game. For the way that Sid made, for this you have to act now.

Sid Meier: And we’re able to use some of the conventions that everyone understands with a controller. That the right joystick moves the camera around, the left joystick moves your unit. The A button is for your default action, when you are in the city screen the shoulder buttons will cycle you through all your different cities from one to the next. So a lot of the things are pretty intuitive if you’ve played any console game, you have a natural sense of what the buttons and the keys do.

Jake Solomon: We’ve seen lots of new players just pick it up. Console players don’t seem to have any problems, they just pick it up and start moving around.

Sid Meier: And we support that with cursor changes and a lot of visual feedback in terms of what’s on the screen in terms of what you are doing or what you are about to command your units to do or whatever. It seems to work very well.

[24:20]
Elizabeth Tobey: All right, well I think that wraps it up for today. We’ve been talking about gameplay in Sid Meir’s Civilization Revolution, which is coming out this spring and I want to thank you guys for being here.

[End Music]