For znu. CIV article inside
Posted by
oblique (aka kkuphal)
Mar 11 '10, 06:53
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March 8, 2010 - Last week we had the good fortune to visit Firaxis and get a firsthand look at Civilization V from several of the game's creators. Not counting the Colonization mod, this is the series first return to the PC after making the leap to the console and handheld platforms with Civilization Revolution. Some fans feared that the leaner (and loonier) style that Civ displayed on the consoles might bleed over into subsequent PC sequels. Based on the pre-alpha version we saw, that doesn't seem to be the case. There's a fine line between making a game easier and making it easier to play, of course, but Firaxis is committed to maintaining the depth the fans have come to expect.
The first suspicions of a market-driven compromise are usually generated by the dreaded "A" word, accessibility. While it's true that some game systems, like religion and espionage, have been removed, fears that Civilization Revolution on the console has dumbed down the gameplay of the PC sequel are unfounded. In the case of Civilization V, accessibility just means the developers want to make it easier to understand and manipulate the complexity within the game. Most of these are merely matters of convenience rather than cutting back and, with that in mind, it's clear that the interface for Civ Rev has definitely impacted the presentation in Civ V.
Basic commands and notifications have been simplified and pushed into the corners of the art deco interface. The few unit actions that players use all the time will be aligned on the lower left edge of the screen, but you can expand the list to include the whole range of possible actions. Small icons will pop up each turn to notify players of new events that might require attention and clicking on those icons will take players to the location in question. The idea is to give the player as much information they need without ever taking them out of the game itself.
The whole game has a very painted look.
Advisors are also making a return to counsel new players on particular aspects of the game but their overall tone will be much more serious than in previous versions of Civ. New players will also be saved from wasting time by having the "End turn" button transform into a "Choose production" button if a city happens to be sitting idle. Even with the streamlined interface, veteran players will still be comforted to see that the top line of the screen reveals the presence of the hardcore elements, tracking things like science and gold production, happiness, culture, resources, and even the time remaining on any Golden Ages.
One of the biggest changes to the game is the new one-unit-per-hex restriction. Previous Civ games have been dominated by the "stack of doom" where players create an unstoppable super unit by piling all of their units in a single square. That strategy is not available in Civ V, which should, the designers reason, pull combat away from the cities. Now when an invading army enters your territory, you'll want to send your spearmen and warriors and swordsmen out to fight them in the fields around your towns. Cities will automatically defend themselves now, and can benefit from increased defense based on certain structures or technologies, so you don't necessarily need to garrison a unit for defense but you can if you want to.
Because you're limited to just one unit per hex, battles have the potential to be much more tactical, both with regard to the placement of your units and geographical obstacles. We saw a few battles that highlighted the significance of the new system. In one, two groups of units were facing off against each other around a one-hex lake. An archer unit was able to fire at enemy units on the far side of the lake and stay protected from melee attack by two allied units on either side. In another battle, a small group of powerful units were able to hold off a much larger attacking army in a narrow mountain pass. Because the attacker could only bring one unit into the fight at a time, the defender was able to eliminate the numerical disadvantage.
It's all worth it once you start shooting flaming arrows at cities.
Civ fans are already very familiar with the terrain-based combat modifiers (crossing rivers, holding hills, etc.) and appropriate unit match ups. Adding in the additional burden of managing an army spread out over a large area just means doing it all on a different scale and making sure that your ranged units stay clear of melee. Fortunately, the game will allow adjacent allied units to swap positions, so you can keep fresh troops engaged with the enemy and rescue your ranged units from contact with melee fighters.
As fun as they are, battles are just the basic components of victory and without a clear direction you can win every fight and still lose the game. A lot of effort is being made to ensure that the AI in Civilization V behaves in a way that makes sense. As we watched a test game play out in front of us, AI programmer Ed Beach explained the way the AI uses subsystems to create and execute its strategies. At the lowest level, the tactical AI uses the forces at hand to win a battle on a local scale. One step up from that, the operational AI picks which battles to fight and makes sure that the necessary forces are available. Moving even higher, the strategic AI manages the empire as a whole, focusing on where to build cities and what to do with them.
At the top of the ladder is the grand strategic AI, which decides how to win the game. If the grand strategic AI decides to go for a conquest victory, the strategic AI will build the infrastructure needed to wage war and the operational and tactical AIs will choose and fight the battles. That way the tactical AI won't be fighting battles merely for the sake of fighting battles, but because those battles are relevant in the grand strategic AI's big picture. In the case of the conquest victory, the AI will be aiming to capture the other civ's capitals, which is all that's needed for a military victory this time.
It sounds kind of insane, but Firaxis is constantly running AI games in a test environment to get a better sense of the relationships between all these systems. The one we saw playing out had the Songhai starting out very close to the city-state of Rio de Janeiro. Askia, leader of the Songhai, is very conquest-oriented, so it's no surprise that he tends towards military action. His civilization immediately went into warrior-rush mode and he soon had six warriors heading off to capture Rio.
Unfortunately, along the way a few of the warriors were lost in an unexpected fight with barbarians. So now the AI has to decide whether the tactical AI can even win the fight against Rio and, if not, what other adjustments need to be made at the other levels. Each of those four levels also has a unique opportunity to set or be influenced by the AI's research and diplomacy goals, which requires even more flexibility and cooperation among the various subsystems.
The practical upshot to all this complexity is that you have an AI that keeps the detailed decisions in line with the overall objective -- winning the game. To add even more variety to the mix, each of the 18 leaders in the game will come with unique personalities based on "flavors." Flavors define a leader's preference for certain types of gameplay and, to a large extent, you'll be able to guess which way a particular leader will lean. Katherine has a high expansion flavor, so the Russian empire will have lots of cities. But she doesn't have a high flavor for city growth, so her cities will be much smaller than Gandhi's. Elizabeth has a very high naval warfare flavor, so her English empire will strive for control of the seas.
The hex map and one-unit restriction makes combat much more tactical.
It's important to note that this doesn't mean that the AI leaders are predictable, just that their flavors will tend to drive their gameplay in certain directions. There's a substantial random element as well, so you'll still never be quite sure. Imagine that Napoleon's conquest flavor is, by default, an 8 out of 10. Before the game begins that value will be adjusted by up to two points in either direction. So you might be playing against a Napoleon who is a 10 on conquest, or against one who is only a 6. Either way, he'll be inclined towards conquest but if he's at a 6, he might be more inclined to follow other priorities like science or trade. Flavors can even change based on context. If England starts in the middle of a large continent but near horses, Elizabeth will suspend her focus on fleets and instead put more emphasis on horse warfare.
The grab bag of leader traits from the previous Civilization games is gone now in favor of traits that are entirely unique to each leader. We weren't told what any of the new ones are, but we do know that one of the rejected ideas was to have one civ treat forests as roads. It ultimately ended up being much too powerful, but it should indicate the direction that the team is taking with the new traits.
The diplomacy screen is now a full 3D environment complete with animated leaders speaking in their own language. Each leader has a unique scene that reflects who they are, so you'll meet Gandhi by the river, Napoleon on the battlefield and Bismarck in his office. The backgrounds are animated, and in some cases even interactive, so you'll see Askia standing in front of a burning town he's just conquered, or watch as Washington casually spins a globe. Specular mapping, depth-of-field effects and self-shadowing models help add to the realism of the scene, but in keeping with the tone of the series, the leaders are all slightly idealized. Bismarck is a little thinner, Gandhi a little stouter, and Suleiman look a bit like a Turkish Santa Claus.
The leaders are much more animated this time around.
A lot of effort has been made to get each leader's personality out in their interactions. The defeat screens offer a good example of this. If you defeat Askia, he is belligerent and promises vengeance. Washington on the other hand, seems depressed by defeat, almost as if he's thinking about the people he's let down. Oda, on the other hand, is actually a little more gracious towards the player in defeat, suggesting that you've finally won his respect. One of the best displays of personality is Caesar's declaration of war. He announces he's going to crush your civilization almost like it's a waste of his time.
In addition to the regular offerings, civs that have discovered writing can also form research pacts with each other. For a little bit of cash up front, each civ gets a 15% boost to research for 20 turns. Either side can break the agreement (by, say, going to war with the other partner), but since both lose money in the process, it's hoped that research pacts can help to foster goodwill without the exploits possible under Civ IV's open border system. One hex of a given luxury resource is now good enough to improve happiness across your entire civ now as well, which should also encourage more trading among civilizations. If you've got two marble and two dye, there's no reason to avoid trading one of each away if you can get access to ivory or spice.
Strategic resources are handled differently. There the quantity is very important. One iron deposit, for instance, will only grant you the right to build and maintain, say, five iron-based units. You can't build any more than that until one of those units dies (or is disbanded) or you get access to more iron. You will be allowed to keep those units in the field if your resource is pillaged, but there's an additional maintenance burden and you won't be able to replace them if they're lost.
Civ V's new city-states offer an interesting way to gain access to new resources. These are single-city civs that are placed at the start of the game and aren't in competition for an overall victory. In a way, they're like NPCs that can help grease the wheels of diplomacy by offering bonuses to the civs that they like best. You may start off near Budapest and find that they have silk, or can provide a culture boost to your civ. If you give them gifts of gold or units, they'll start to like you. If you fulfill their requests, like saving them from a barbarian attack or capturing one of their city-state rivals, they'll like you even more. If you liberate them from a foreign conqueror, you've probably made a friend for life.
You could, of course, simply take them over but the benefits they give you are more than you could earn on your own. You'll need to weigh the benefits of having an extra city at the beginning of the game against the long term value they can offer if they're independent. It requires a substantial investment because your relationship will degrade over time but it's well worth the effort, particularly if a nearby city-state is getting friendly with one of your rivals.
It's interesting because even between two civs that have no other reason to hate each other, the presence of a small third party can make diplomacy so much more complicated. Imagine that the tiny city of Florence is right between Hamburg and New York. The Germans and Americans might not have any reason to go to war with each other except for the swaying sympathies of this one tiny city and the bonuses that it confers. History's full of large wars that were launched over small cities, so it's great to see the chance for that to play out in Civ V.
Your empire will tend to grow towards the food.
Borders are also handled a bit differently. Instead of just dropping a big culture bomb at certain thresholds, a city's territory will keep better pace with population and grow one tile at a time. Now when you get a new tile, you'll probably have no other choice but to work it. It's still based on culture, and you can drop some cash to speed things up, but culture growth will be more relevant over the long term in Civ V. You also won't pick the tiles individually. Instead the game will weight growth towards "good" tiles like grassland or wheat and away from "bad" tiles like forests and mountains. It makes sense that culture would tend to spread quickest where people can settle and make a living, but we're not sure yet what impact this has on production-focused cities that need lots of mines and forests.
Even though there are no more city defections, the AI will pay closer attention to the growth of your borders. If you found a city right on the edge of Rameses' borders and suddenly start rapidly taking over all the land that produces the most food, you're likely provoking him to start a fight.
We often leave the discussion of visuals and sounds to the end of these previews, because turn-based strategy is so often focused more on the content than the presentation. Civ IV excelled in terms of appearance and Civ V is pushing things even farther. Apart from the more organic look of hexes, the whole game makes use of distinct geographic flavors, so you'll be able to tell whether a forest is meant to represent Europe, Africa, Asia or the Americas. The entire game has a much more painterly look, as well, which makes it seem more natural overall.
The audio cues are also based off of what you see on the screen and are layered appropriately. In the previous game, if you were over a certain tile, that's all you heard. Now you'll be able to hear the tiles you're focused on but also the sounds of the desert or water off in the distance. This is even carried over into the combat. If a unit dies and falls in the forest, it will sound like it fell in a forest. If it's by a river, it will sound like it fell in a river. All of these sounds are positional too, so if you've got a surround setup, you'll hear them happening relative to where they are on the screen.
Sound will also reinforce the culture of the civs themselves. Each civ has lists of licensed music from its own culture (Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and America), and you'll hear either the war playlist or the peace playlist depending on how you're behaving. There are also unique orchestral scores for war and peace in the diplomacy screens each based on actual melodies from the civilization they represent.
Even after a whole day talking to the team and seeing the game, there's still so much we don't know. While the community is likely hungry for even the minutest details (yes, you need to research the calendar to access cotton; yes, you can build Shakespeare's Amphitheater; yes, Montezuma is in the game) we're more curious about the bigger picture. What are the peaceful victory conditions? What's new in multiplayer? How do unit promotions and great people work this time around? How does the in-game mod browser work? Unfortunately, Firaxis isn't ready to talk about a lot of those features, so we'll have to be patient until we get more information.
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