I had a lengthy interview with Talk Strategy recently on some of the ideas behind GalCiv II and what we were hoping to do with it. Here is an excerpt:
TS: It's hard to miss that you have the word 'civilization' in your name as a 4X game. Do you think Civilization IV raised the bar for the whole 4X genre? Has it made you rethink anything?
Definitely. Civilization IV is the best turn-based strategy game I’ve ever played. I love it. And it has been to everyone’s advantage that it came out when it did because it has raised the bar so much.
A lot of people don’t know this about the game industry but game developers don’t look at each other as "competitors" like you have in other industries. We were involved during the Civ IV beta and they’ve been involved in our beta. Soren from Firaxis has been very supportive of our efforts and has given us a lot of very useful suggestions and feedback for Galactic Civilizations II.
The two games are different enough that someone who likes Civilization IV won’t feel like they’re retreading on the same ground when they play Galactic Civilizations. But we’ve tried to make sure that quality and polish level of the two titles are similar.
TS: There seem to be two schools of though on sides in 4X games. One has a small number of very unique sides while the other has many sides with minor starting differences. Why did you make the decision you did?
For us, it comes down to balance. Stardock developed the Starcraft add-on for Blizzard called Retribution. In Starcraft there were three races who were radically different. Blizzard was constantly having to balance things between the three of them and I remember during the development of the expansion how tricky it was setting up the maps and units such that it was "fair" to all sides.
If the different sides are that radically different, it puts a very hard limit on the number of sides you can have. And in a diplomacy-heavy game like Galactic Civilizations, we wanted to have lots of different factions.
That said, each race has its own ships and there are three ethical philosophies to choose from, which have dramatic repercussions on gameplay (though often subtle). So there are some stark differences between races. But at the end of the day, we wanted to make sure all the players were playing the same game.
TS: Tell us about the AI and describe a time when it surprised you.
The AI has gone through an immense amount of work this time around. Because we don’t have multiplayer, the AI takes center stage for the game. The AI can’t just be tough – that’s easy. The AI has to play like a human would. It has to be challenging but also be suffering from the same problems that a human player experiences.
In terms of the most surprising thing I’ve seen, I should note that since I write the AI, I rarely get surprised. But one thing I had happen this weekend was a war I had with the Drengin. The Drengin had been focusing on phasors for weapons and shields for defense. In preparation for war with them I amassed a huge fleet of capital ships filled with missiles which go through shields like paper.
But when I finally launched my attack, the Drengin had amassed a fleet of "Mark VI" Battle ships which were equipped with Point Defense technology. That had spotted what I was doing and adapted before my attack. Things didn’t go well for humanity.
TS: If I understand correctly, there are no tactical battles or multiplayer in GCII. Could you briefly explain why and go over their prospects for the future (either in an expansion or the next version)?
Sure. The problem with tactical combat is that it tends to consume the overall game.
Picture this – you’re in a galaxy-wide war. There are literally thousands of worlds. Thousands of ships. A given game turn might have two dozen battles.
Now imagine if the player had to tactically fight each of those battles? Most of the player’s time would be spent there instead of running a galactic civilization, which is what the game is all about. Now, you say "well, just put an ‘auto fight’ button." But using Master of Orion, the gold standard of 4X games, we know that tactical AI is almost never as good as a decent human player. So good players would feel like they had to fight the tactical battles if they were going to be remotely close in order to maximize their results.
TS: Normally 4X games start slow, have a great middle and a somewhat tedious end game. How did you address this problem?
The problem you describe is scaling. Most games don’t scale well as the game progresses. What we’ve done in Galactic Civilizations II is make sure that the game interface and game mechanics scale.
At first, players manage individual ships and planets. The fun at the start is exploring the galaxy, designing ships, negotiating with aliens and telling planets what to build.
The fun in the middle is fighting wars where players are managing fleets of ships (the number of units remains the same, but now they’re fleets instead of individual ships). The planets don’t have the micro-management issue because the buildings automatically upgrade themselves based on technology. So the middle part of the game involves only sporadic interaction with planets.
The fun at the end of the game is using the rally points to tell various fleets of ships and planets to automatically send ships to certain strategic points. Giving orders to your governors to switch production from one thing to another or telling ships going to rally point X to go to rally point Y. Players in essence deal with task forces of fleets and groups of planets.
The computer players know when they’re beat and will surrender. They won’t hold out until the end most of the time. So mopping up isn’t as much of an issue. They play as humans would… Well not quite; when I play online in strategy games, human players tend to quit the instant that the tide starts to turn against them, while our computer players will at least give you the satisfaction of knowing you have definitely defeated them.
TS: How's development going and when should we look for Galciv II? Will there be a simultaneous retail and Stardock Central/Total Gaming.net release?
It should be out at both retail and digital distribution at the end of February!
Read the whole thing.
