Civilization V Interview

23 Jul 2010 at 20:44:19 by Elly Davis

So Sid Meiers takes a back seat on the latest production of the hugely acclaimed turn-based strategy, Civilization V. IncGamers caught up with 2K Producer Garrett Bittner.

There's been a huge change in the way Civilization works. Tell us about some of the new features in Civilization V.

We've moved away from stacks of units.  In previous Civilization titles you could take all the units and just pile them in one big stack and move across the landscape.  What it typically did in the game is it really favoured the civilization that had the most production; they could churn out the most units.  What we've done now instead is move to one unit per tile and that makes the game much more tactical, much more strategic.  If you carefully think about your units you can be much more effective with a smaller number of better placed units.

The weight of units has always been an interesting part of Civilization, development and progression trees and different warriors, also the way that you evolve depending on which race you choose.  Is that something we can expect to see and has there been enhancements to the AI as well?

Yes, that's definitely something you can expect to see. All the core tenants of Civilization are represented in Civ V.  The core gameplay of taking your first settlers and founding a city, expanding your empire, building up an army of all sorts of different units and researching new technologies so you can build better units and buildings, all these new wonders. All that stuff is there in Civ V, we are just taking it to another. level.

Diplomacy in particular we've put a lot of work into the AI and made it feel like you're playing against a real player, maybe even like your friend, somebody you enjoy playing against. You know their tendencies, you know what they like to do to win the game.  The AI in Civ V is going to have that same feel. Napoleon, when you play against him you know he's going to be very aggressive, he's going to try to expand and build a big army.  They are also intelligent; they are going to be able to adapt to the world around them, they are also going to be more world-aware, they are going to see when you are approaching their borders and when you have a big army. They will try to amass a defence and prevent you from taking over their lands.  They can adjust the way they are playing the game.

Elizabeth has a maritime focus and if you're blocking off all her harbour cities she is going to maybe play a more expansionistic game build some more cities, expand that way.

Let's talk about the win scenarios.  You got cultural wins as you did before, you've got diplomatic wins, and capital wins by taking over people's capitals. Are there any new kinds of wins that you can get, presumably from the social aspect as well?

The win victory conditions are what you expected in previous Civilizations. They just happen in new ways.  One thing that has always been interesting about the Civilization series is the number of options you have to play the game and we're bringing all those options back in Civ V and a few new ones you may not expect that present some interesting gameplay opportunities.

The victory conditions are all really well balanced and present a really great gameplay base even towards the end of the game and we're really excited to see once when people get their hands on it and really get into the core of it to see what they think of it.

Sid Meiers hasn't been working on this it's been Jon Shafer's project now, how has that changed how the game works?

Sid Meier has input on all of our games truthfully. Sid Meiers is a big part of Firaxis and a big part of 2K Games so he's been involved in Civilization V, obviously not as Lead Designer, as this is Jon Shafer's project and his vision.  Some of the things that he brought to the game that are his own specific identity are hexagonal tiles and one unit per tile those are really big things and things that he is really passionate about.  So those are the new things you can expect from the new designer but it has that core stamp of this is a Civilization title because Sid Meier is involved.

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