Absolutely No Pressure: Continuing a Successful Game Series with Civilization VI

[Music] welcome everyone to talk on civilization 6 I'm ed beach from Firaxis games I've been the lead designer on Civilization 6 that was released last October my talk here is going to run about 45 minutes giving us some time for questions at the end I want to thank the GDC folks for the way they scheduled things this morning they put Sid Meier's Civilization came to that talk as well ok so actually a good percentage the audience just wanted to invite you to take one more talk with me right now so in that sivash anil take another turn here and move forward now jumping forward into the future 25 years and talking about Civilization six so one of

the things I'm going to focus on during my talk is about how many people have opinions about Civilization games and about Civilization six so I'm sure they're quite a few opinions out there in the audience and so I've been told that we can even spill over a little bit on time at the end if we want to fielding questions so if anyone does have questions I'm happy to take them at the end and we can dive into things in as much detail as you want so anyways let's go ahead and get started the first thing I want to do is just give everyone a quick refresher on the Civilization series [Music] in the beginning the earth was without form and void the Sun shot upon the sleeping earth into the swirling maelstrom of fire air the first stirrings of life appeared the

seeds of life grew and strengthened spread and diversified now it required but more ingredients to unite the quarreling tribes and to harness the power of the land to build a legacy that will stand the test of time a civilization [Music] [Music] so civilization has now been six games 25 years five lead designers dozens of intro movies and quite a few animated leaders some of them a little slicker than others I've seen the last eight of those years and served as a lead designer since the gods and kings and brave new world expansions to su5 but

that still means that when we started the process for civics design the Civ series itself had been around seven times longer than I'd been a lead designer so taking the reins to this series was definitely a daunting proposition to add to the pressure sieve six launched excuse me soup five launched in 2015 and one thing that you'll note about sieve 5 is it spent all six years right there in the top ten most played games on Steam this screenshot is actually from the steam stats page one a week before sip six and released and you could see so if I was doing doing quite well still very healthy and in third place there an additional factor going into releasing six last year was that 2016 was going to be the 25th anniversary of sieve one so we're gonna have 25 years of the same

franchise and there was a lot of attention both in the media and in our marketing devoted to that 25th year anniversary you can see here we have a picture of Bruce Shelley and Sid who just did the previous talk meeting with some of the other early sieve lead designers at the dice summit in Las Vegas it was about a year ago last February and that was sort of a folk focal point for that conference was that panel where they were doing a retrospective on sieve we also had a big marketing campaign that rolled out as the year was going on you can see here at e3 last year in LA we had Civilization six themed stairway leading into the Convention Center we had a theater presentation narrated by Sean Bean who you just heard in the trailer I just played for you and there are a bunch of media events that were happening associated with civics including our first event held on

Facebook live where we did a Q&A session with our community manager and sort of answered a lot of the early questions about what civics was gonna be that session alone attracted a lot of attention we definitely realized it was picking up some hits on Facebook when we had a certain man with 86 million followers on Facebook tuned right into the stream and tell us sip 6 I'm looking forward to it so it's an intense year I definitely you know as being the lead designer for the first time had had a whole bunch of interesting experiences but I did look forward to getting at least a slight break from the action in the middle of the summer because one of the things I like to do every year is go to a world board gaming championships and both play

and run some of the board gaming tournaments there so got this three four day break went to that tournament and one of the things that I noticed was the sort of the civic hoopla followed me right into this event so one of the lighter more casual events I attend each year at this convention is it's really a comedy show disguised as a trivia game hosted by John Corrado who's kind of a friend of mine who I'm showing you on the screen here John knew ahead of time that I was going to be there and he kind of asked me earlier in the week he's like.he gonna be there okay you don't mind if I bring up sip 6 a little bit and I was like sure go ahead whatever you want to say that's fine well I was in the audience in fact I was right there in the audience and John made no had no hesitation about pointing that out to people and sort of diving in like we've got the Civic's lead designer here right now and he actually used it as a platform to

kind of get across his message that there's absolutely no pressure on you EDD but I loved sieve five and if you mess up sieve six you're in big big trouble so even even on my breaks I was having trouble getting away from the civics hoopla the only consolation I got out of that was in this particular event since he had themed it around Civilization six because he wanted to highlight my presence there I did get a few categories that he chose for trivia that were sort of right up my alley so we had 100 most game played games on Steam and then the one that I definitely aced just sort of ran that category right away so yeah I know a little bit about the wonders of the ancient world by now so maybe there was a little bit of pressure here with that in mind I kind of want to dive into you know with

a backdrop like this with a successful series that's been around for 25 years how was our team going to go ahead and attack this project how would anyone designing the next game in a hit series proceed so one other thing I noticed was that this question of how do you proceed in a hit series was something that a lot of people are wondering about in all those press interactions at e3 and in some of the other interviews we were doing last year it was a repeated question they kept saying how are you going to find anything to add six games into the series and so I started thinking about you know that is something that's perplexing to a lot of people it's something that you know it's gonna be applicable to lots of people in the game industry because so much of our work and our titles are based around the

fact that we have an established franchise and we have to add on to it and augment it and so that's why I got the idea that yeah maybe this is a worthy topic to address here at GDC so I actually found it sort of an interesting question because we had adopted a process that we'd used kind of first with the gods in King's expansion and it sort of made that question not as difficult as it seemed like the press was feeling like it should be because what we wanted to do when we were creating sort of any successor in the Civilization series whether it's an expansion pack like gods and kings or whether it's it's civilization six is we want to really look take a hard look at what we had done previously and think about as game players as game designers what is working and what's not working and we did that as part of our development process for gods and Kings

we we may not have had a whiteboard in the office that had exactly these lists of four items but we certainly came up with lists of items that these four items were all on them and we do a lot of internal discussion we have a external beta test team that is sort of like community leaders and giant fans of the series some of them have been working with us for two or three titles in the series maybe even longer and we're sort of always looking at our game and what's working and what's not so just a couple examples from the civ 5 expansion packs and gods and Kings we were seeing that the combat wasn't balanced the way it should be there were cases where because the rule of combat was every time you made an attack you were always gonna do one hit point of damage no matter how weak you were we were having situations where ten archers in the ancient realm could still be

around facing something like a giant death robot in the modern times and as long as you had ten of them you could take that giant death robot down so one of the things we introduced for gods and Kings was a hundred hit point scale to better balance combat we had a problem that we were thinking we wanted to attack with the sieve five based game where players would get into a game world get into a situation and they might have picked a civilization to play that just wasn't a very good fit or there wasn't any way for them to kind of customize the bonuses that they got so that they would really be adapted well for the the terrain around their initial cities and for the type of victory they might want to pursue and in gods and kings we were able to address that by adding a religion system we also saw that there wasn't that much awareness of what the AI was doing that there was a lot going on in the depths of a sieve 5-game that the AI was taking place in but people

weren't seeing that and so we added an espionage system to address that and then finally the problem that we had was that the naval units they were all attacking us range units they were very one-dimensional they weren't much threat to any one city because they weren't allowed to take it and so for that expansion we added melee naval units and this process of sort of self-examination and you know becoming critics of our own games and using those as springboards to figure out what capabilities we were going to put in the expansion was something that we just kept going with so we went into the brave new world and brave new world again we made a list of items that we thought were still not working right in Civ 5 even with the gods and Kings expansion we felt like the culture victory was kind of bland it was just finish a certain number of social policy trees and the do one building project so we added a tourism and great work system to address that we

didn't like that with the new base movement rate of two spaces in Civ 5 that the exploration game ended so quickly so we wanted to add more exploration later in the game and we had an archeology system to address that we felt like the diplomatic victory was pretty bland it was just a matter of kind of spending a lot of money on city-states and that's sort of what sort of a people called it an economic victory instead of a diplomatic victory because really how much money you had and when we added the World Congress for brave new world it really made that part of the game more interesting and then there are cup more items you can see the economic engine interdependencies didn't become as rich and as as important until we added trade routes and then that sort of final push to victory the climax at the end of the game the tension in the 20th century was addressed with our ideology system so you can see again here it was

a matter of kind of really taking stock of where we were at looking at what was working what wasn't working that was the way we got those expansions to kind of flesh out the civil five experience and give you you know exactly what you get now when you place if I've complete so that's sort of where we started the civics work we looked at how we had proceeded with those expansions we looked at how they were a matter of itemizing issues and then using that as a springboard to move forward and we felt like even though what sieve five was very successful was still being played a lot on steam you know it was not a perfect game there was plenty of opportunities to find places where we could improve it and so we started going about making our list of what we wanted to address for Civ six now one way that we really you know push this further is I have to continue to give shoutouts to

our community we have a very engaged community a very passionate community but one thing that they always are good about is they're never short about giving us opinions and so it's always easy for us to go up there and you know if we're wondering about which sibs are overpowered or underpowered with the current release they've already produced a list for us and itemized all that for us if they're telling us if they want to tell us you know which system they like better and sit for and which one went way downhill in the sieve 5 and there's only finally making it company you know all that data is up there so I see postive now and again where the community people are like four axis ever read this forums I don't think they're paying any attention to us that's totally ridiculous because you know I have a whole office of designers that's been way too much of their day reading the forums sometimes I have to pull and don't read the forum's right now we need to you know buckle down and get going so one thing that I did when I was looking at what they thought about sieve 5 and and this is

the strategy forum for civ 5 just yesterday afternoon I just pulled it down and pasted it in here just so you can kind of see it's still hotly debating things about how to get to the science victory as fast as possible and posting guides for players who are trying to win on immortal and deity one thing we noticed is that they had looked at the tech tree and they had all sorts of plans for exactly how you attack the tech tree what is the optimal strategy yeah I'm I'm not going to swear that this is the right optimum strategy this is just one I pulled off they have symfon annex yesterday but I found it interesting because with the arrows there and everything it's sort of a perfect example for me of how people found sieve five to sort of be a solved problem they kind of identified this one overarching problem that we kept coming up against and that was that there was

just a single path to victory that would always get you through the game successfully didn't necessarily matter it matter which map type which victory type you're going if you follow I think it's five little mantras that I've got here that I brought got from the community you were able to go to be successful in winning the say five game so let's look at those build only four cities rushed to the national college science is king tradition for your social policies not never Liberty and get to rationalism as soon as you can so those I mean they're probably more that the community focused on but these were the kinds of things I kept seeing over and over again I kept going there and these were sort of the magic recipe to get you to a successful conclusion in the civilization five game and this was the number one thing I wanted to address for civilization six is I wanted to be

sure that players were going to think on their feet they were not going to be able to use use a couple key points every time there was going to be situations that the game was going to throw at them that they were gonna have to react to they're gonna have to think on their feet so you'll see as we go through the talk that that's sort of my number one principle in terms of guiding us to what we're gonna change for Civilization six how we're gonna change it and then we'll wrap up at the end today and you'll kind of see how how there was one key component to solving this problem so I started thinking about solutions and and I'll sort of give away what the key component is right now but how it works into all the different things that we came up with is what we'll end up diving into more deeply so in order to come up with a solution to this problem about players being able to always use the

same strategy to win we had to look at what changes every time you play a civilization game because it's those things that are changing that are gonna force players to think on their feet if they're presented with situation that doesn't look like what they were faced with in the previous game they're gonna have to adjust so I love the Civilization series it's the perfect game for me working on because I love history but also because I love maps and what changes every time you play is the map and that's sort of the most exciting time for I think a lot of civilization players a lot of people who say I play the beginning see what the maps looks like explore it I may not finish that game because it's just so exciting to get back to that point where I get to start a new game again and explore the map again and dive back in so I knew that the map was sort of the key to what makes the civilization magic work Sid and bruschelli talked about

that a little bit in their talk about how important it was to stick with randomizing of the map every single time and so that was going to be sort of the centerpiece of the solution for Civilization six so what I'm going to do right now is we're going to start taking a deeper dive we're going to go into those areas on Civilization five that I felt like we we needed to make improvements so we're gonna dive into five different areas and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna identify sort of what I see is the problem instead of five and then talk about how we solve that for six so the first area I want to look at is how tiles are used outside the city and I looked at how they were being used in civil and I felt like those decisions we're kind of lacking I call them wrote decisions because there wasn't a lot of thought being put into it so if you look at this particular screenshot it's just a nothing special I just grabbed like the first sip five screenshot I could

find off the internet but I started looking at the improvements outside this city and you see ok Farms are placed on the flat land especially if they're near the river you've got mines anywhere there are hills or resources that require mines the resources that require a special improvement like a plantation or a camp they get that improvement and pretty much all those choices are automatic you don't have to think about what you're doing with those tiles it's just automatic there is one thing that we added for civ 5 that was sort of a nice hint at where we might be going for Civ 6 that that last arrow that is put down in the corner that's showing you a Academy which is a great person building and those sort of went into any tile you know that you wanted and the kind of interesting thing about that was it was sort of always was one of your leftover spaces whatever you considered like the least useful area you're gonna use for

that but at least it was you had to scan all the tiles around your city to try to figure out which was the best place for it and that was sort of what we decided we wanted people to be doing much more frequently in civic so it's like having to look around all their city tiles look at all the possible places and then choose where the their next move is going to be made so that's exactly where we went with sip 6 and this is actually our unstacked city system that was a change that we were sort of dying to even when we were in Civ five development we had really pressed our development team really had pressed John Shaffer thus if five lead to try to put the wonders out on the map we knew the art would look a lot better we knew it'd be interesting in terms of placement decisions but I think John made the right call there was a lot going on already with sieve five we had taken the combat system and moved it out onto the map and unstacked all that was

one unit for tile and it would have been just too much changed at once but these unstack cities you know I probably two years before we started Civ six I knew that this was going to be one of our number one features for that game so you can see in this particular example if you haven't played Civ 6 sort of how this works we have a science campus up here nestled up against the mountains we have a commercial hub along the river a holy site it's also inspiring for religious worship to have a mountain backdrop so that's a good place to put it up against the mountains and then also the fourth item here the Hagia Sophia that's one of the wonders outside the city and so what I think is so interesting about the way this works is now rather than there's one use for every tile with those tile improvements that we're showing you for su5 we actually have at least three different layers of items that go outside your city both the tile and permits from so

five these new districts that I'm showing you because we pulled the buildings out of the city and put them out into the districts and then wonders as well have to go outside the city so now you have those three competing layers and they're all looking for a spot outside the city and now every time you're building in the city you're having to make choices and trade-offs about how you're gonna use each of your tiles you can actually say that for a lot of our civilizations we make it even worse for you because we add in unique improvements for that civilization so like the Egyptians get the Sphinx the Sumerians get the ziggurat and now you sort of have a fourth layer where I'm going to fit in and unique improvements into this jumble and then we said well there might be some civilizations that don't get unique improvements so what are we gonna do for them they need to have that same just torturous situation as a player trying to figure out how to use every tile so what we did is we went ahead and created some city states that also if you are allied with

that city state you get to temporarily use their ability to create unique improvements so we have the colossal head unique improvement that's allowed outside the city so maybe if your civilization doesn't even have a unique improvements you can go ahead and have to worry about them so this is actually it doesn't always happen in game development but this is a system where we sort of had this pent-up desire to put it in we tried it in Civilization six in some of our earliest prototypes years before we actually got to 2016 and shipped it and it worked right away so definitely a success but I'll get to some some areas where we struggled quite a bit more okay so problem number two that identified from Steve five was the way the tech tree worked and if you came to this talk earlier you saw that you know the tech tree has been a huge part of civilization it's pretty much worked the same way from civ one all the way through to sieve five and you know we

kind of looked at it as a place where not much innovation and happened maybe we should look at it and there was one thing about the technology tree that had always bothered me in civilization games so let's focus on that for a second so let's look sort of it the same screenshot I had up before but now we're gonna drill into the top of the tree and look at the sailing line and you can see sailing and optics or both technologies there now sailing takes 13 turns calendar takes 17 turns it really doesn't matter what's going on my game world those are always going to be proportionally take the same amount of time my people are have just as good an opportunity to get into sailing as calendar even if I'm in the middle of the biggest continent you've ever seen and my people have never seen the ocean and this didn't make any sense to me you know how are you guys learning about sailing when you have no water anywhere near your civilization

it just felt like the tech tree was off in this all disjoint universe that had nothing to do with what was going on in your actual game world why shouldn't those two be married together why shouldn't they have some interdependencies you know you the technology and the research of your people just needs to be something that is inherently tied to what they have done so far and what they're about to do so we looked at that and one thing that we came up with was it would be very interesting to go ahead and come up with a system where you could trigger things by doing actions with other units or your cities out there in the game world that was gonna be sort of game play directed actions that help you with this path through the game with your progression through the technology tree so that's how sailing came to have a boost go ahead and found a city on the coast and all of a sudden what we're

gonna do is fill up that half of that circle you see there so 50% of the credit towards the sailing technology research is going to be given to you for free if you can get a city on the coast and we started out it was it was tricky at first because the first time I sat down and and was looking at the ancient and classical tech trees and I had to come up with boosts for all of them I was like I I got the sailing one nailed but there are another 20 technologies here and what's gonna make sense and you know that probably took me a whole day and a half two days to come up with just the first cut at what that would be and we put that in the game and we played played it that way for probably three or four months just to make sure that the system was working and everyone liked it right away which was great it was it led to sort of more directed play early in the game it gave you sub goals sort of even gave us a way to tutorial eyes things like if players aren't gonna find

a trade route because they just never really found that particular unit well maybe we put it on the boost that you get a boost for making a trade route and now all the sudden people are like okay I got to figure out how to make a trade route that's going to be important to me and so so it had a whole bunch of positive outcomes that we were seeing right away we're really excited about it but I knew that I'd only spend the day and a half two days to do the ancient and classical boosts and I knew I had a whole you know five six more epics worth a boost I was gonna have to come up with I kept putting that off probably it was like six or nine months later I actually got around to doing boost for the whole tree and it was it was a little tough but we ended up finding a pattern that you look for things that you had unlocked recently and if you haven't used those things even though you've unlocked them then perhaps you shouldn't be moving on to the more advanced technologies so it took a little while for us to figure out how to apply this kind of kernel of an

idea that worked really well in the ancient era throughout all of history but overall this was definitely a success and something that we didn't struggle with too too much but now I'm gonna get into something where we did struggle and the problem here I already alluded to it before when I put up those mantras of the sieve five players go to tradition never go into liberty rush to rationalism as fast as you can this Social Policy tree we loved a lot of things that did it was very thematic in terms of giving you things that culture could unlock for your civilization and give you boosts it was really sort of a integral part of what had happened with brave new world with our ideology system so we didn't want to throw this out we wanted to keep the idea of social policies being items that could give you you know specialized boost in a certain direction but there

were a couple problems that we felt like we had to address and I think the number one thing that we wanted to attack here in terms of social policies was we had sort of lost something that had been in the series previously with civilization for in civilization for you had been able to what a lot of players called pivot their government so something dramatic could happen you went to war you weren't expecting it or you're coming back from a war and you have to kind of rebuild your economy you could switch out civics go back to things that you had focused on before maybe jump ahead to things you haven't had before but there was this sort of ability to kind of retune the way your society was working the way your government was set up and and that sort of gave players a lot of sense of control and sort of like they were making policy decisions sort of like a government leader would in charting the future for their for their empire so so that was sort of a good thing that's it for had that we lost instant five

because once you made a choice on a social policy on one of these trees it was locked in and what was worse is once you jumped into one of these trees and started developing it we gave you a big incentive to finish it so we sort of locked in not only the choice of that one social policy that gets you into the tree but we sort of encourage you to make a commitment to keep going on that tree till you're finished and that ended up just not being as configurable and those flexible is what we wanted so for civilization six what we started out with actually looked a little bit like this now this is Justin Visio in the next few slides or unearthed from the archaeology system that is our design Docs and going back and pulling out screenshots from them but you can see here what the sieve six civics system and yes that is a tongue twister we realized that right away we were going

to have problems pronouncing that but the civic civic system started with this design for social policies now some of it survived you can see right away it had military policies in sort of that weren't just read and economic policies in the gold and we the wild card and diplomatic policies we ended up with those those were around from the beginning and we stuck with it it had all these little sort of aqua blue unlocks associated with every single social policy and it was similar to our boosts and we I think we were we were too enamored with our tech boost system at this point and we gonna make everything in the game unlock with that and so why not every single social policy have have a different unlock because you know we could come up with something that made sense for everything right so so many unlocks just way too many unlocks it was I don't even think we got this implemented before we started realizing there's just too much

cognitive overload on the player there's no way they're gonna be able to remember what they're pursuing we did pair this with a list of governments that we wanted to have and this we changed a few the names around but this set of governments and the fact that governments have different numbers policy slots that stuck through but what we found with our players with this first system was they didn't know what they were doing in terms of how they were supposed to be progressing through that tree there were things like we had this Imperium government it sounded really cool maybe they should stick in that for a long time are they supposed to go through all you know some players thought they should go through all nine in order and you know that's switching government's way more than we thought people should be doing so it was just a little too chaotic and the progression path through these governments was unclear so we didn't throw out all this we kept some of the code but we had to you know redesign refactor some things

and so our second try at the civic system we did add government tears so that you could kind of at least get a sense that these three governments were all more powerful than where you started but they might be sort of they were more on a par with each other so that you you could kind of pick one and you don't have to feel bad that you're skipped the other two and that just sort of made sense to players that that it would it teared like this we were anticipating you were going to switch governments at least three times during the game and with this tier structure all of a sudden that just sort of fell into place so so that was a nice change but we did have kind of this weird construct that we borrowed from brave new world for how you get into the different tiers we sort of were forcing an upgrade when a certain dramatic event happened in the game and we actually kept the exact trigger for the last three governments that the once you've got a certain number of factories in your empire you're gonna

have a big working class and they were gonna just dictate that you have to govern them with one of the 20th century ideological governments and we sort of felt like this interesting decision about what government you're in that we're trying to make you know kind of cool and fun and a new thing that was going to be introduced for civics was was kind of fighting against these forced upgrades that we were putting in play every time you hit one of these tiers so we try we tried to relax that in our next version civics system version three and this one was notable because now we finally put in bonuses for the government's we thought that if you get to pick two you know maybe you've unlocked the tier two governments but you really like that Tier one government it's really working for you right now we wanted to let you stay in that but the incentive to staying in it would be is if there would be bonuses

associated with those governments that you want to hang on to a little bit longer so we were getting somewhere but we still had one big problem with the Civic system and that was the fact that the way I sort of hadn't really described how you move into a government how you slot in a policy but we had this really cumbersome system that all this was done by spending culture and you would sort of accumulate a treasury of culture just like you do have gold and every time you want to make some type of governmental change you would just grab some culture from that culture Treasury and apply it to the problem and all of a sudden boom you'd be able to switch governments or a slot in the policy one that sort of felt weird because you know accumulations of culture sitting around for thousands of years waiting to be spent that doesn't make much sense in the real world and then the other thing that was was happening was you we were having

problems where you spend all your culture get your government set up right and then something would happened in the game world we were tying everything to the game world and something would happen and it would be the situation where oh wow I just unlocked this new government oh I don't have any culture left to switch into it and so even though it would seem like the right time to make one of these cultural shifts you couldn't do it with this spending down from your culture of Treasury that we had going so we finally kind of took the big step in the right direction with civics system version four and this was something where we finally went ahead and created the parallel civics tree that anyone who's played civics has seen this is an idea that had been kicking around we had talked about doing this probably for a full year before we actually switched over to it and we were wrapped around the idea that our civics has to be done different than technology

it has to be something that feels more cultural I can't feel like technology but if you look at the technology tree that sort of is a gaming construct put on top of science and that gaming construct works actually very very well for us here because now you don't have to have an individual unlocks for each policy you can have the policies unlocked in a bundle when you finish one of these Civic nodes that are the equivalent of technology nodes we can associate boosts with the whole Civic and so there's little unlocks that we had that were from doing things out in the game world now those could we wouldn't have to have as many of them maybe you know a third to a quarter as many of them but we could still have that type of system so in general as soon as we finally made the switch over to the Civic system things started to fall into place now this particular civics tree which is the very first civics tree we tried did have some problems if you look at it the

the pink nodes again this is of apologies for my vizio art skills because they're just vizio art but the pink ones are required the white ones are optional and you can see you can just blow through the ancient age pretty quickly there are there only three nodes in the whole engine area civics tree that you have to go for we also had governments all-out on their individual nodes so you can sort of pick and choose from those and so your ended up skipping a lot of the classical tree - and in general there wasn't much decision-making to your path on this tree it was there was pretty much one path to follow you know with maybe a few choices but we need to make this tree richer and deeper and more varied so that's sort of how we ended up with our final civics tree is we went ahead and created something that looks like the tech tree and it was really fun this is one of the the fun exercises of civics was trying to reimagine all the

improvements that societies and governments and cultures have made through the year and what those look like in terms of how they interrelate to each other which ones lead into other ones and so we ended up with a tree like this this is showing it later in the game and the government screen here where we finally came up with that time where you finish research on a new Civic and actually we never called it researching a civic we felt like that was the wrong term you only research technologies so internal to the team we came up with this term innate term that you research technologies but you cultivate civics and so you'll actually if you dive deeply enough into the XML and the files you'll see all these references to culture evading that was our favorite term we ended up almost shipping the game and telling people

that they were cultivating even though that's not a real word and it only makes sense in this very very specific context but if you guys want to start using cultivate I totally approve of it it's one of my favorite words in the last three or four years so so go for it okay so two more problems to go through and then we can get on to questions and this is these last two are areas where probably su5 took a lot of heat and some of it was deserved and some of it we agreed to agreed with so that's why made it onto our list of top five problems with so five and that's the one unit per tile system I absolutely loved it it brought tactical nuance to the game but it also brought some problems so let's look at the biggest one of those which was unit congestion and so if you look at this particular screenshot right here I'm pointing to a mobile surface-to-air missile unit and really its main purpose in the game it

can defend so you can sort of use it as a defensive trip if you need to but it's pretty much its main purchase in the game is to shoot down aircraft but in this particular configuration it's sitting there occupying one of the key tiles that the Aztec army needs to approach Katmandu and to capture that city so it's in the way it's blocking things and that's that's just part of you know kind of the the repeat problem that we kept seeing in Civ five games was that people were having their units fall on top of each other you know stumbling upon themselves and they couldn't get a clear path to what they were trying to get to with their military you also notice on this map that you know it's a cool-looking map it's got a lot of interest Katmandu sin this really strategic position right where all these peninsulas come together but those strategic positions right where the pencil come together also the worst places for unit congestion so in this kind of situation where you're trying to attack it it actually becomes pretty frustrating so we wanted to look

at that and that was something that wasn't too tricky to solve as long as we just you know sort of attacked that problem directly from a design point of view so we added three different things skip ahead to the next slide and I'll go back to yeah so we had three things we had two support units so now all those mobile surface area missiles anything that is not a frontline fighting unit but you want to have in your army was going to be something that could be stacked with other units and that was going to help with the unit congestion and it was also going to you know be able to move as a grouped unit with your other military units and then the other thing that we did was we allowed you to group units of the same type together in two

cores and armies that was immediately going to reduce in that one localized area the amount of map congestion we had by a factor of two or three but we were very deliberate about that decision we didn't want to go back to the mix stacks that sieve four had because then you started losing the clarity as to you know he's he's sending his mounted troops around my flank does he have his melee units up in the front that are guarding ranges behind them so we wanted to be very careful to maintain that sort of tactical rock-paper-scissors nuance to what was happening on the battlefield but we wanted to collapse units together and let them occupy the same tiles so you can see that not only do we have the helicopter army here but we also have naval units that are grouped into course

and armies we just happen to call them fleets in our modest so in general this definitely helped with the the over stacking problem and we felt like we were able to kind of bring things out in the map and we're allowed to you have those kind of cool choke points like I was showing on that progression up to Katmandu and it was gonna be okay in our game okay and now I'm getting to the fifth item and this problem is something that probably is the solution we came over here is probably the most controversial of the solutions we had members even an internal to our development team that we're telling us you know just a couple months before we're shipping that we're making a huge mistake with the decision that we made for civics here because it was going to confuse too many players and we shouldn't do it but if you think about what I've been emphasizing here is I wanted to make sure that the map was important in your games of civilization

six I want to make sure that the use of all the tiles around your city was important I wanted to make sure that you had to think about where you were in the world in terms of which technology booths and civic booths you could unlock maybe you don't have stone nearby you you cannot go into masonry as early and get the pyramids like you you know if that's your big plan to how to get ahead in the ancient era and there's no stone well there's no desert nearby you can't actually get the pyramids in this game so we had done these things through the unstacking the cities through the tech boost system that we're really helping us bring the map out to sort of you know a preeminent role in Civilization six and what we didn't want to do was let people kind of get away from understanding the map and appreciating the map and realizing the importance of the map and so there was this thing that had happened in all Civilization games with movement rules that I called cheating the terrain and the problem there if you look at this screenshot

right here you'll see that we have a Indonesian Chris swordsman in Civ five he's only got one movement point left because he's already moved into this clear terrain space that he occupies right now but despite the fact he only has one movement point left and should not be able to get anywhere except for another clear terrain space according to the rules of civilly matter he can just dive in there he can go into either the desert hills that are highlighted with the blue circle or into the woods to the west and that actually led to this really sort of awkward movement strategy in Civ 5 where what you want to do with your guys is always end their turn in difficult terrain because then they have better defensive bonuses and you can do things like you can scoot down a valley where the terrain is nice and clear and then on your final movement jump up onto

the wooded hill and see way off into the distance as you're scouting the terrain so especially when you're scouting the map and especially when you're worrying about defending you always want your last move to be in this impossibly difficult terrain that should cost a lot of movement points and it was it was fighting against people's appreciation of the map so what I wanted to do for sip 6 was change that and one thing that I noticed about sieve 5 before we leave sieve 5 is in order to get this blue movement skirt around the unit that highlights the places you can go you had to know to click on the special move mode button and only if you turned on the move mode would you get the ability to see the valid hexes your unit can move too otherwise you would just right-click and just move there so we got the sieve 6 and I propose we're gonna have new movement rolls they're gonna actually enforce the proper movement point costs for terrain and you're gonna have to pay that much to go

in there and I put it in and everybody hated it they just felt like I don't know why my guy only you know he's got one movement point left I want to be I'll do something with it it just was confusing players the turns weren't ending right I got a whole bunch of flack from the team internally and if I struggled with the Civic system getting that right this was one where I was just actually getting people coming in telling me that I was absolutely taking the franchise in the wrong direction and I needed to change this now so I thought about this some more and I did not want to give up to it and luckily I had two or three other allies in my design office who appreciated why we were making this change love this change and we're really willing to stick it out with me and work through until we had this working properly and so eventually sort of a long story short what ended up being the key thing that made me comfortable with the way we're gonna proceed here was I started thinking about four axes his sister game XCOM I

started thinking about movement and XCOM and there's a lot of complicated moves you make an X comm I don't know how many of you guys play XCOM but you go up and down ladders you jump off buildings you you know they're like multiple levels there's different types of terrain you have to go around and I don't underst I'm all the time I love XCOM it's what I do sort of when I get a break from Civ I go off and play XM for Alex it's a different strategy game that's got very very different rules but I have no idea how the XCOM movement system works I have no idea how you spend points for that what your range is and I don't need to know as a player because when I have a unit selected it just shows me a blue movement boundary for everywhere I can go and I just click on one of the hexes in that area and all of a sudden that just works that's my move for that guy for that turn I don't need to know the specifics of how much everything costs and so what we did is we took that blue boundary that you saw in SIP 5 was only available when you

went in that special movement mode and we made it always a part of how you made a move in civics as soon as you have selected that boundaries going to show and you know where all the volatiles are and when you're in this situation like shown on the screenshot here where you only one movement point left the boundary will shrink down to just where he can go sort of for the second part of his move so we put that in and all of a sudden our user tests we're coming back people understood it they got it things were looking like we could actually ship the game and have this system in place people were going to be able to have the proper appreciation of the map that I wanted so let's see where that leaves us so I'm listing four different things here on the left side of the screen pretty much the four major problem areas that we'd identified from sieve 5 when we'd sort of taken a hard look at ourselves and kind of been real critical to figure out what we need to change for sip 6 the only one that's not listed there it's a civic system which which is

not really necessarily directly part of map driven play but it does respond to that overarching goal I had about having to think on your feet and not having a single path through the game because the Civic system lets you reconfigure what you're doing with your empire and sort of launch yourself into a new phase of the game that's gonna be aligned with your new short-term goal but if you look at these four things here I think in all four of these areas we really decided that the best way for us to hit this primary goal of making it so that you're gonna have to think on your feet more and have a more you know customized experience each time you play because you're going to have to redo your strategy all four of these items contributed to it and they all brought it out through driving the play through the map so one of the things I love about what we did with sip six is not

only was the map important to the gameplay but we sort of followed that mapping motif with our artwork so you can see here not only does the fog of war look like an ancient map it was sort of that old parts menu look but we actually it's not shown on this screenshot but we actually themed the user interface the heads-up display has sort of a age of exploration theme to it as well so that's kind of what I wanted to go over today I think because we have a little bit of extra time I can still take it at least ten minutes of questions and I thank you for coming out to the talk okay hi thank you I really want to sneak two questions in but I was here with Sid and I asked him like my favorite part of that franchise is the civil on the end of game replay really tied together like this accomplishment over 30 hours and I was wondering why that disappeared yeah

and I was here for that session see it apologized that he had thrown me under the bus because he had not answered your question but I'm happy to answer that question I know I'm not sure when I'm gonna do a talk like this in the couple years at GDC but one thing that has been clear to me as we've been working on Civilization six is that the process of rolling out a new title and the civilization franchise it's it's a five six year proposition and we have to make a lot of decisions about you know where everything is going to hit during that rollout and what's the right things for the base game and which things you know maybe we have plans down the road in the future to really do a great job with and so some of the support that might be expected will come down the road so I just ask you to be patient because we we

actually may look like we don't care about replay systems at all but it's actually something that is still very forefront and our thinking and second so how what is the process for iterating on design on a game that takes 30 hours to play it's tricky and there are a lot of ways we sort of cheat that if you look at the fact that some of the setup options in the Civilization game I don't think our players ever use or use very very rarely but they're instrumental to what the team does in terms of us being able to iterate on things so for instance we have what we call our advanced starts where you can start a game in the Renaissance or start a game in the industrial era we use those all the time yeah that's how you can just dive into a part of the tech tree and see how it's playing you can try out air combat without having to play for five hours to get to it so there are tricks and techniques like that that we've sort of adopted over the time and some of those like built-in as options the players don't use very often but the development

team uses quite a bit okay hi I'm Laura I'm walking out on pleated studio we're creating game like an estrogen Forex game first of all congratulations for this amazing sake we're like really so I really like the boost the tech boost system but after some games I just realized that even me were not really an optimizer player I was starting to trying to achieve all the condition to have all the boosts and at the end I just you know all this you need that I don't really want and this improvement in my city that I don't really chose and and I don't know if you thought about that and maybe thought about a more random system for this boost Civ 6 is can be a bit of a frustrating experience for somebody who wants to try to achieve sort of that perfect game and optimize everything there's a lot of things that

we deliberately put in your way to make it so you can't have the perfect setup so you can't get all the wonders you have to make trade-offs about how you're gonna use the tiles outside your city sometimes it's the you know the Sun the science campus tile up against the mountains that you want to use for that gets you know pilfered to put in your holy site or a wonder that has a specific requirement so yeah I realized that that we sort of made the choice to make force people to away from having a sort of a perfect layout and a perfect plan but if you look at what we what I was going for here in terms of trying to make people have to adjust and not be able to rely in the same strategy every time I think that's sort of you end up there no matter what okay so I actually was going to come up and say that I really hated the movement system but you apparently went over that

right at the end of the talk yeah even yesterday in my playthrough I would try going to a forest and my dude stopped and then I lost the city and I was like you movement system but actually my question to you is slightly less game mechanic based and more about the civil opinion so in step five six six you guys introduced religion and did a lot more things and one of my favorite parts of save has always been the civil opinion cuz it's text that we've actually learned from over the years and I feel that in civics a lot of the civil pedia entries in a lot of the tech research entries that you get the quotes that come up when they seem a lot more snarky snide almost kind of mocking the thing that you either discovered or trying to research it seems a little bit more hurtful I guess then you would expect from a sieve game and I was just concerned with I guess or wondering what the design behind that would ya we've we've gotten that feedback before it's

certainly not the first time I've heard that and if you came to Syd's talk you can see that even insid one they were wrestling with what's the right balance between sort of respectful you know true historical treatment and humor and there probably are some areas where we we missed the bar a little bit that on civic so we'll definitely learn from that I don't think we've made a permanent shift in one direction I think that's something where you know you try some things out some things work some things the community pushes back a little bit and that's probably an area where we learned a little bit more about what the community really likes yeah and also you guys misspelled Guru Nanak snai min the civilization entry for Sikhism and I feel that that's a 10 second google search maybe made your important leader well we'd absolutely love to fix it because and we do that all the time we go back and if people email us or whatever tweet me whatever we go back in

and we patch up everything because we know that people are going to be playing Civ six five years ten years hopefully from now and so we might as well get it right for people all the way down the road so so send those on to us there's a lot of text in this game it gets localized into over thirteen languages things like that do happen hi how are you so i I've played all the sub series from one through six and I want to congratulate you that you know sift six really feels very much part of the series and it's actually a very good game in the series you know so I've been very impressed by it thank you so much thanks before I get to a question like in the earlier presentation at dev I did bring up a question about you know what just said but I want to bring it back against his socialist social responsibility as a game developer you know in any industry of the whole I think we want to meet moving towards more of that and and I think you know Firaxis plate like this game really can

play a big role in that and I would like to see a bit more on the educational aspects to be highlighted and kind of in the tune of this little piddy question as well I think I think we're losing a bit of that and especially in this day and age it's important to bring more of that back so I did encourage more of that um my question is how you guys understand what users are doing with the game so I heard a lot from you about listening to the community near the forums but about how much are also looking at actual usage of the game and analytics in terms of you know how people actually playing the game and how do you balance that with what people are demanding on the forums okay and I just remembered I'm supposed to be repeating the questions for the forum vault video for this so I'll start that right now the question was how do we use analytics and look not only of what the community is saying but actually some raw data from how the game is being played to inform our decisions going forward so we are definitely looking at that we did

not have a full telemetry system coming back from the game in Civilization 5 but we have put that in for civilization 6 so all of a sudden we do start to get aggregate data we don't you know ever focused on any particular user but we get aggregate data for like how often certain tech boosts get triggered which civilizations people are playing which types of victory are they going for and it's actually you know I I know that's a new trend in games is to get that kind of Telemachus in there but it's already very very clear to us that this is a huge new tool that's going to help us going forward and this should make us able to tune and really get civics to the best possible place you know without having to make as many guesses as we had to make in the past so it's a great question and it's definitely something that we're focused on we also run a whole series of focused tests before the game ships that's another great source of data about how people are playing the game

and what they're struggling with so yeah I'm noticing that it's sort of a whole new world in terms of having that kind of supporting data to really influence your decisions some of what I showed you here was you know designer instinct and maybe not necessarily based on data but you know I think you need a combination of the two to really move forward in the best possible way thank you okay all right so let me take one more so we ended now okay all right that's it for questions but I will still be up front and I'll take your questions personally okay thank you