My Elephant in the Room: An 'Old World' Postmortem

[Music] thank you my name is Soren Johnson and this is my elephant in the room an old world designed postmortem here are the games that I I've worked on spoiler alerts civilization 3 and 4 are going to come up a lot in this presentation I also do a podcast where I interview game designers about why they make games so check it out if you have time for four hour rambling interviews uh old world is a 4X set in classical Antiquity with a focus on characters the simplest pitch is to imagine a game like Civ but you are actually Alexander the Great each turn you get a year older and you'll eventually die and one of your children will take over I've already mentioned the word civilization a number of times so let's just talk about the elephant in the room there's not a single preview or review

for old world that does not mention sieve somewhere in the opening paragraph every twitch stream you'll always see a quote is this a new sieve somewhere in the comments more personally here is my my own elephant in the room civ3 and civ4 so why why should I go back to make a historical tile based Forex game a civil like so to speak indeed civ4 was a best case scenario for a young game designer it's the number 18 PC game of all time I met a Critic and the number one strategy game the century it somehow even won a Grammy award uh for for Bobby yet too by my my college roommate Christopher tin and this was definitely not even on the radar when we developed the game so needless to say um you know it's all it's basically it's all downhill from here so uh before I explain why I made old world let's talk a little bit about what

the game is and how it was developed uh this is the very first pitch screen for Old World um it was a lot simpler at the start in this image it was conceived of as a tablet game with the order system and a resource Market but without characters uh here are some screens from the game's prototyping phase the earliest prototype in the upper in the upper right was uh multiplayer only uh just as I had done with civ4 and you can see that by uh 2018 we had uh just started to add characters to the game here are some shots leading up to the release uh there's there's a lot to digest here but I just wanted to give you a sense of how the look and feel of the game changed year by year so now let's talk about why I made old world why go back to revisit games that standvel on their own and moreover are part of a franchise that is continuing to succeed and grow

One Good Reason is to know your inheritance to re-examine it to look for ideas which were baked into the earliest version of the game and see if changing them could transform the experience a good example is what I'll call quote every unit moves which is how SIV has always worked every unit gets to move once per turn serve inherited this mechanic directly from Empire a game from the 80s which had much of the same term-based tile-based combat Civ but without the scope of all human history and Empire got every unit moves for more games which you can see here in the form of a Monster version of the Eastern Front the conventional way to play a hex based war game was for every counter to move once every turn the problem with every unit moves is that you are not actually making any trade-offs not not actually deciding between your military and your infrastructure it's guns and butter there is no reason not to take an action this is one of the main sources of the

late game slog and Civ games if you've built 100 units then that means you have 100 decisions to make each turn and frequent decisions are rarely interesting ones indeed worker automation has become a standard expected feature in later Civ games because player no players know that these constant low-stake decisions become boring quickly because creating more mines and Farms has no cost to the player there is no reason not to do so of course players don't want to have to do with busy work themselves and it's busy work because these decisions have no costs no trade-offs generally speaking anytime you have to add automation to a game it's a red flag a good time to evaluate whether the thing you are automating is well designed this is a slide from the original pitch deck explaining how orders would work on the left you can see every unit moves and on the right you can see how it works with old world it's up to the player to decide how to spend their orders orders didn't just come out of the blue

instead it came from a number of sources including some odd ones like Facebook games here is frontierville by Brian Reynolds the designer of Civ 2 which took Farmville and added an energy mechanic that limited the player's actions this was an odd little moment in time by the way three former Civ designers myself Bruce Shelley and Brian were all working for Zynga and even Sid was making sieve for Facebook note that the point of the energy system in frontierville was to ration out progress so you don't burn out on the game which creates fiction friction and thus a potential micro transaction I I didn't have the interest in that indeed I'd say I had anti-interest in it um but I did like how it made you think about what to do with your actions you know suddenly interesting decisions emerged here's another example from that time period Hero Academy from robot entertainment this game gave the player five actions each turn which could be used for moves or attacks however the player wanted in fact this game went even further than

old world as units could attack multiple times per turn and not all war games used every unit moves Eric Lee Smith's Civil War game used an initiative mechanic where you alternated moves with the other side which could allow you to move one Army many many hexes in one season while other troops were left in place coincidentally this was actually the first war game I discovered as a child so I do feel like its rule set has always been in the back of my mind work replacement games are also an influence as they are all about giving the player a lot of options but a limited number of actions choosing to do X means you can't do y 'all the thing all these systems have in common is forcing the player to choose one thing and not to choose another in other words guns or butter the order system was always part of this design and it gave me a reason to return to making a civil like game as this one simple change would radically transform the game there are many other new things I wanted to try but with this one change was the reason to get started

of course like all the giant design just because you have an idea doesn't mean you know how to implement it there are probably a hundred ways to make an order system oh my gosh hold on okay I'm good uh no I'm not good what is going on here I am so sorry uh my nodes I'm sorry my notes are out of sync for my slides work replacement s okay I got it of course like all design just because you have an idea doesn't mean you know how to implement it there are probably a hundred ways to make an order system work I know because I tried 99 of them here in the very earliest multiplayer only version of the game you could actually buy and sell orders freely just like the other resources it was super interesting strategically but was perhaps too

interesting as it warped the whole game towards who could buy the most orders here are some of the other different versions of the order system that we tried one was on a real-time clock there was one where you could stockpile unused orders between turns and one with a hard cap and so on we eventually settled on the fatigue system where most units could move three times a turn but could move farther via a force March which had a steep cost however most of these other ideas didn't get tossed away instead we hid them behind late game laws coin to basement unlocks buying orders for example and Elites unlocks stockpiling orders that's a useful trick if you ever have something which is interesting but just too powerful don't cut it right away instead Shuffle it away to the late game where it can stay interesting but rare I was worried about the ramification of orders for the AI but in the end it worked out for the best because it enables the AI to actually attack on their own initiative instead of coming to the player slowly turn by turn

allowing itself to get picked off multiplayer sessions on the other hand were fascinating Victorious teams were usually the ones who saved orders for their economy as roads became hugely important in order to make units more orders efficient the strength of the order system was the huge possibility space it created each turn because there were so many different ways to spend your orders this vast sometimes intimidating space led to the undo feature which kept players from feeling overwhelmed players could try out multiple ways to launch an attack and then just change their mind and do something else uh it was initially intended just to help with Miss clicks but became a pillar of the game and was was actually an awesome for debugging too uh indeed undo turned out to be one of our most popular features it was often one of the three or four bullet points listed in the Pro column at you know the end of a review uh it's a it's an unexplored area a number of games like invisible ink and into the breach have experimented with limited undos but we didn't find that necessary players

appreciate being able to play the game however they want it helps of course that we do have deterministic combat games with a lot of output Randomness would not really be a good match for an undo button while we are mentioning quality life features like undo I also have to mention our help system as our tooltips have tooltips as is often the case of strategy games tool tips refer to something that you need more information on which usually means taking a trip to the manual or the wiki or the in-game aim encyclopedia in Old World you can just Mill click or shift click to open up a new tooltip off of the previous one now we might want to know what Rancher means so we just opened up another tooltip hmm I wonder what Civics are and so on you can go as far as you want we have infinite tool tips I definitely want to mention that the designer who pioneered infinite tool tips is John Shafer who worked with me on civ4 and was the lead designer of civ5 old world was the second game to implement them and I expect them to

become a standard convention for turn-based games in coming years I wrote this line in a column entitled water finds a crack back in 2011 and it is now permanently the most popular post on my blog it's sort of Taken on a life of its own showing up in random videos and other GGC talks and it's super applicable to ICS what is ICS you might ask ICS means infinite City sprawl the bane of Civ designers basically players learned early on that the most optimal way to play was to squeeze as many cities onto the map as possible each other each iteration of the game tried a different method to fix this issue Civ 3 had corruption so forehead maintenance civ5 had Global unhappiness but ultimately they are all basically just unfun Band-Aids yeah interestingly this is a solved problem for a space Forex games master is a Master of Orion nutritionally considered the first SpaceX sorry the first space

4X didn't have this issue because cities are equivalent to planets so one city per Planet thus uh they're they're literally a fixed number of cities each game endless Legend and humankind do something similar with regions cutting the board up into territories at the start of the game and then allowing only one city per territory we tried something like this with Civ 3 but I was unsatisfied with it because I felt that your choices should determine the borders between cities not the designer's hand before the game begins I found a middle ground between limited City sites and dynamic growth by by putting preset City sites on the map then all the Border growth after that would be determined by the player's actions new brother excuse me new borders would come from tile specialists and urban improvements thus we rejected one more piece of our inheritance as our borders have always come at least in Civ 3 from a city's culture

finally City Sites also gave us a natural place for tribal camps which helps Drive conflict and ensure that the player needs to balance expansion with military and not just Spam sellers civ5 introduced one unit per tile a big change for the series definitely another elephant in the room although in this case not my elephant at any rate the popularity of civ5 and Civ 6 meant that a lot of players would expect one unit per tile debates rage over civ4 stacks of Doom versus civ5's carpets of Doom uh however making a big change to combat was needed for civ5 as each iteration needs to shake things up a bit just as old world needs to justify this existence each each version of sieve does as well so we started with one unit per tile simply because it was the easiest thing to code but I thought I had a clever solution for a better stacking system simply put the player could stack units but if that tile was ever attacked each unit on that tile would be hit equally

therefore because old world has no counter attacks stacking a bunch of units on the same tile would be very dangerous so we were naturally encouraging players not to stack their units but they could be tempted to if stacking an extra unit on a tile got them a Kill however before finalizing anything we decided to try classic one unit for tile combat just to see how it felt and surprisingly it felt great it works because old world doesn't have counter-attacks like all of the other Civ games combat is essentially split across multiple turns with units trading blows until one dies or retreats each separate attack is without risk only the target is damaged the order system made this necessary because allowing Defenders to damage attackers is basically akin to giving them a free orderless attack and Defenders almost always have an advantage in these types of games anyway ultimately I wanted to reward attacking because attacking is more fun

pictured here is a very rare version of risk risk only a thousand copies were ever printed it's the one Rob davia worked on before designing risk's Legacy and it made one huge crucial change to the game it added objectives which are important because you win the game not by Conquering the world but by simply being the first player to achieve three of them they were so important to achieve that they changed how players would play the game instead of playing defensively and twirling up in Australia players would want to go on defensive each turn to grab these objectives which go to the first player to achieve them you would overextend yourself to try to actually control Asia just because you wanted that objective even though you knew that you would probably lose Asia the next turn and it made for a more Dynamic game because attacking is fun generally speaking taking actions in games is more fun than making it harder for other players to take actions conservative counter play is less fun for you and it's definitely Less Fun for your opponent

Civ players are used to beating the AI by allowing it to kill itself against your heavily fortified units so taking away counter damage was a big change but again I wanted to reward attacking because attacking is more fun however allowing players to overload a combat front via stacking to get a kill took away the opportunity for the defender to counter attack so one unit per tile was actually a very important piece of the puzzle to making our combat system work really you have to look at it holistically as all three of these systems support each other the biggest problem with one unit per tile and sieve is that it leads to traffic jams where units clog up the tiles between cities so City Sites alleviate this problem because we can enforce a very high minimum distance between these cities much higher than in a Civ game the order system on the other hand ensures that units don't block each other while moving through tight passages because every unit can make multiple moves per turn if necessary and as I mentioned one

unit per tile balances some of the extremities of the order system by making it impossible to form Stacks to kill a unit in a single term which would then remove the ability to counter attack so the three systems fit together nicely but you're seeing one another now let's talk about the tech tree which has always had a problem with golden pass for example at the start of civ4 you can just click on gunpowder and the game will show you exactly which 11 Technologies you need to research to get there for a game with average play times in the hundreds of hours this becomes a real problem indeed with the popularity today of games based on random runs fixed Tech trees are basically going against the grain of contemporary design I found a solution from deck building games like Dominion what if we treated all the texts like cards instead

so action hey it works all right so all texts currently available in the deck uh so all texts currently available are in the deck and you draw four at a time the cards you don't pick go into the discard pile along with any new cards that you unlock then you draw four more for your next choice and don't reshuffle until you've exhausted the deck this doesn't just add variety it also makes the decisions more interesting because you know because you know that when you don't pick a tech it won't be available again until it comes all the way back through the discard pile through the draw pile and then back into your hand passing on ironworking means that you might be able not be able to see it again for a long time the system is certainly more complicated than the traditional Tech Tree but it helps a lot that many players are already familiar with deck building mechanics because of their popularity all right

turning text into cards also enables the idea of bonus cards which give an instant boost like a free settler as you see here or a great scientist or a lump of stone there is a nice short term versus long-term trade-off here as science points are not easy to come by so slowing your progress for a short-term boost is a difficult Choice an interesting decision if you played my last game off-world Trading Company you know that I love stockpiles and markets and building improvements that spit out resources at a different rate at different rates so I wanted to give that a try for old world one of the reasons Civ games haven't done this is that cities can get stuck because they they might not have the resources to build something you know if you have no access to Stone or you're just not able to build buildings what happens each turn then we solved that problem by barring the dynamic open market from offworld

you know need some iron to build a swordsman just buy it from the market if the price of iron is too high then sell off your excess Stone first note that although we were making a game with a free market it's not a game about the free market so instead of having a single price for All Goods there would be some friction so we use the original system from Age of Empires or the bipot price is double the sell price thus while buying resources from well buying resources from the market is always an option for the player it's generally is generally best to produce them yourself servers always had a generic production resource sometimes called Shields hammers or just production but when to building everything settlers Warriors temples the pyramids everything I wanted to split this production into different categories so that cities could actually specialize what might be good at building military and other developing developing Specialists and another at creating settlers and workers so we split production into three

categories growth training and civics foreign know what actually to do with these yields when the city wasn't producing that type of item but the stockpot the but the stockpiles for food iron wood and stone were working so well that I decided to try that for training in civics I didn't know exactly what I would use it for but was confident that I would find a use for it over time you know as you can see we eventually found plenty of uses for the the global training in Civic stockpiles I put together this chart of all the non-resource yields and how they connect with the game you can see how every yield occupies a unique place in the game and even this is an incomplete list you know we could also do it by shrines by theology by the council and so on another benefit is that the code considers all of these yields including food iron wooden Stone the same type of thing so it is very easy for the event system to suggest some unusual trade-offs you know would you like to

sacrifice some orders for some extra science maybe trade your Civics to another Nation for food in return one of civ's most Troublesome systems is the tile citizen model where your food production and commerce is by is determined by which tiles your citizens work is a complicated system here's the civ1c screen I remember one Civ developer once quipped that the best feature of this screen was that if you clicked anywhere it just disappeared and you were no longer afraid each each citizen in a city is assigned to a specific tile and these tiles all have different yields and the player has the freedom to move every city every citizen around every turn over time the designers have added all sorts of automated systems to include encourage players not to mess with their citizens and remember with workers how automation is a red flag

even worse for hardcore players the citizen system is a temptation to lose hours and hours of time with needless micromanagement because there is no cost to moving your citizens around every turn to eke out some small one percent benefit these are not fun decisions there's a pattern to these systems which suck the player into boring micromanagement they lack any real trade-offs either because they have no costs or because they are temporary interesting decisions come from giving something up and for making decisions that you'll have to live with for the rest of the game decisions where you have to think holistically pass the information Horizon you aren't just doing math to figure out what gives you a single extra food this turn instead you are making what gives you a single extra excuse me you aren't just doing math to figure out what gives you a single extra food this turn instead you are making an intuitive decision about what might get you more food farther down the road and whether food might be more or less valuable to you later on than it is right now

our way out of this problem was to have all improvements produce yields on their own but then citizens could be permanently turned into Specialists on a specific Improvement to boost its its output by a 50 to 100 percent and give other uh benefits as well such as exercise furthermore these Specialists would each have a cost both a food cost and an opportunity cost building a Trapper or a poet doesn't just cost food it also means your city is not building a chariot or another settler more importantly though your decisions will be permanent there is no opportunity to go back to micromanage and Rewind your decisions permanent decisions are a very important tool for a designer it gives the player the freedom to move forward and not optimize the fun out of the game finally let's talk about culture

which as I mentioned before no longer determines borders instead culture is now measured in four discrete steps four discrete steps that determine the internal advancement of your cities one uh former Civ designer who will remain name this who will remain nameless actually suggested to me that I rename culture to quote Civilization but that was that was too cheeky for me uh having four separate culture levels per city was a new orthogonal way to measure progress outside of the tech tree thus wonders are not unlocked by texts but by culture which also allows us to rotate the ones available each game we could also tie your nation's unique units to a city's culture level and also many Urban buildings so courthouses would require cities with developing culture Ministries would require strong cities and palaces legendary ones

now that we felt good about the gameplay we felt it was safe to start exposing Publishers to our ideas this is the first slide of our pitch deck note that it used to be called 10 crowns and the simple elevator pitch is right there in the first Slide the fun of civilization plus the drama of Crusader Kings expect many things to change about your design including the title but it's important to have a core Vision that doesn't change indeed most of the reviews for Old World describe the game exactly this way as a hybrid of civilization and Crusader Kings the initial impetus for characters originally came from the popularity of Crusader Kings we could see how much players latched onto real characters who are born grow age Decline and die it's not just a CK though you can see this trend from XCOM through the total war series up to new games like wildermuth people want to care about the

characters in their games however the the bigger question is why would the game like Civ benefit from characters first off we should mention this actually impossible to put Flesh and Blood people into sieve because the game covers 6 000 years of History that's why we limited our time frame to just classical antiquity so that the game could plausibly last a few Generations nonetheless ignoring the Thematic issues how would characters change the gameplay of sieve to answer that question let's talk about another long-standing problem with Civ known as ECS the Eternal China Syndrome it means that over time civs become more stable less Dynamic and less interesting to manage as they add more and more buildings and wonders and laws and Technologies the internal problems get less and less interesting a bonus is interesting three turns ago now just Fades into the background

the only real pressure exerted on the player is from external forces enemy players characters however provide a way out of the ECS problem buildings and Technologies never get old and die but characters sure do if we attach powers to characters the game will shift as different leaders take and leave the Chrome not to mention new courtiers heirs counselors spouses and so on the dynastic landscape is constantly changing Civ might be a lot more interesting if for example the the map changed every so many turns um unfortunately that just doesn't make any sense thematically even if it would be good for gameplay however characters changing growing old and dying doesn't just make sense players expect it to happen I can't overstate how significant this is taking Powers away from the player in Civilization is basically a non-starter yet here is a situation where players would be upset if they didn't lose these Powers it just it just wouldn't make

sense thematically indeed uh you know we could add powers to characters which you know are done through the architect system that normally would be impossible to add the game if they were accretive in the way Civ usually works meaning that once you unlock the power it never goes away each character in Old World is one of ten archetypes each with special powers if that archetype sits on the throne because players only have partial control of archetypes we can add significant game changing even game breaking abilities here knowing that they'll be active roughly 10 percent of the time hero leaders can launch offenses which allow units to attack twice a turn orators can hire tribal units as mercenaries tacticians can stun enemy units and so on dynastic characters are also a huge Boon for diplomacy an area where Sun changes are always tricky to pull off in Civ

games if a friendly Ally suddenly attacks you it's often described as random or unpredictable AI even though it's crucial for the flow of the game that the AIS are willing to change their opinion of you or else the internal China Syndrome applies to them as well with characters however it's expected that a nation will change his opinion of you when a new ruler takes the throne we didn't design this it just flows naturally from adding real people to the game thus a problem that has be doubled Civ for decades was solved in a way that feels natural to the player after shipping Civ 3 one thing I heard often from the Civ 2 Community was that the body tools lack support for something called events which I eventually learned meant a system of triggers and effects that modders could use to give games a narrative Arc it

could create a series of chapters for example which pushed the story forward when the player achieves certain Milestones I tried out a series of mods to see what was possible and was surprised to see how effective people could push the Civ engine to create something completely new for example here is a Civ 2 Fellowship of The Fellowship of the Ring mod which lets you retrace Frodo's Journey from the Shire to morya encountering all the all the events of the book along the way so to enable this type of narrative Focus mod we added triggers and effects to sephor using python as the scripting language and ultimately just released the game source code itself which led to some amazing mods like fall from Heaven and dune Wars both of which completely transformed the game and proved the amazing potential for both story and modding in Forex games although I had given modders all the power they needed I hadn't actually done the work myself and how to make narrative work in a Forex game

I noticed that events were starting to show up in various strategy games with increasing depth and complexity they added real texture to the experience and perhaps more importantly variety the most interesting mixture of strategy and events of strategy and events was the cult classic king of dragon pass a 1999 game that vanished without a trace on release and then somehow snowballed into a hit decades later as word spread of its wild mixture of traditional Forex strategy Clan management and dynamic narrative the event system was the star and your choices largely determined the path your game took often in Wild unpredictable ways each event forces you to make difficult trade-offs between the demands of various factions both internal and external to your tribe just as we wanted to do with old world however interesting this was it's not a game that I could make first of all this game is an actual beginning middle and end and I have

neither the interest nor the ability to tell a single cohesive story more importantly Dragon pass doesn't tell you the effects of your designs you are meant to just Intuit the results which works for some games but not for Old World a game where transparency is one of the most important design Aesthetics the event system might surprise you but the direct result of each of your decisions needs to be clear for me the promise of a strategy game is understanding what's going to happen each time you click a button while still not being able to predict the future so because transparency was important I turned to the world of war games for inspiration typically the dynamic narrative Masterpiece tales of the Arabian Nights which comes with a game book of over 2 000 events randomly drawn from a deck of cards and which both react to and can change the player's current state The Mechanics for choosing events and how they affect the player are transparent

and easy to understand which was necessary because as with all board games the players have to do all the well all the work themselves so for example having the witton charm trait might help you escape eventual sorceress while an unlucky player without that trait might end up in sourceled which will affect further events down the road what inspired me about the system was that it was robust it's not the intricate event tree where missing a node might cause a story chain to break instead the events are Loosely coupled as they are meant to work together regardless of which random set you draw each time you play the game foreign system is that multiple authors could create events at the same time without requiring close collab collaboration or really any collaboration at all here are some of the authors of the over 3000 events currently in Old World led by our CEO and creative director Leila Johnson many of these writers worked on the

project at completely different times creating Dynamic story arcs by accident one writer might add an event that results in your leader becoming a drunk while another author years later creates an event that only triggers if the leader is a drug and now we have the makings of a little story indeed as we add more events with each bi-weekly update the story system becomes more and more cohesive as more events are added to cover all the unusual permutations that might happen for each playthrough here are just some of the possible inputs that the event system can look for and most of these can be changed by the system as well so the the event system is a virtual deck of events where each one has a potential trigger such as meeting a new nation a set of requirements like a childless leader and possible offense sorry possible effects like a new

foreign spouse it's a broad deep system that makes one look forward to each new turn to see what will happen next what I might be most proudest of is that the multiplier Community is that the multiplayer Community for Old World plays with events turned on we assume the players who wanted to play competitively with with one another will be would be put off by the randomness of the system but they feel like the game is not complete without it in fact we put a lot of work into maintaining an alternate version of the game without events or characters or families or all the things that increase Randomness but I'm glad to say that it was probably a waste of a move that was probably a waste of time because basically no one plays with it yeah one of the best things about the event system is that it adds content to the game without bloating the design without adding new rules for the player to learn we currently have over 3000 events but doubling or tripling that amount will only add variety to the game without

adding any more complexity often with strategy games less is more but this is one place where more is actually more it's the same reason why car based games car based war games like Twilight Struggle and we the people have become popular it creates a deeper experience while keeping a Slimmer rule set ultimately the event system ensures that no two games play out the same way as there are endless possible stories as one event leads into another changing the path of your game while your in-game choices feedback into the event system itself I accidentally built an interactive fiction engine inside of a Forex game and I'm very excited to see where our writers and the mining Community can take it in Civ 3 we introduced the bargaining table to the Forex genre pick and choose what you want to give and to receive from all sorts of potential options it's it's become a staple of the genre

here it is in Galactic Civilization 3 in Total War Three Kingdoms and Total War Warhammer and Stellaris unfortunately it was a big mistake my first inkling there my first inkling that there was a problem was after civ3 shipped and people started to complain that the AIS all tended to have the same texts the reason was that the ai's the reason was that the AIS were using the bargaining table the same way the humans did every time the AI got a new technology they would contact all their friends Rivals and even enemies to see what they could get in return by trading it away which cost them nothing to do but could get them a little something in return from the human's perspective it looked like the AIS were part of a giant Tech cartel and were selling text to each other at bargain prices but the AI was simply pursuing the optimal strategy the

same thing that the human actually did again we have a system where players were ruining the game for themselves because there was no cost to contacting every sieve every turn and also endlessly tinkering with how to get the best deal possible no reason not to just put one more gold piece on their side of the table until you've hit the ai's maximum price for what you were trading away foreign there are ways to mitigate this issue but this is a classic curse design the cursed game design problem as designed by as defined by Alex Jaffe in his fantastic 2019 GGC talk which I recommend everyone should take the time to watch there is a conflict here between the power and flexibility of the bargaining table and the give and take of real diplomacy where flawed personalities come into play and you can't just nickel and dime a rival without defending them ultimately we come back to this

there is no solution here because we are giving players all the tools to ruin the game for themselves fortunately old world has a system in place that could solve this problem by replacing the bargaining table with something else the event system here is one example you married uh Babylonian many years ago and now because of the connection you must choose a side in the war between Babylon and Carthage foreign s the player with interesting diplomatic events and choices that react to the current game State serving up possible paths to war at a pace that is healthy for the player getting rid of the bargaining table was a risky decision because players expect it by now but the end result could be much more Dynamic and interesting and free the player of the burden of trying to min max the table so when you ask another Nation for a truce or for a trade Mission or to start

an alliance excuse me the game gathers all the events with those specific triggers throws out the ones that are not applicable to your current situation such as the events that require a child ruler and then randomly picks one to present to you angry nations are still less likely to want to trade with you but the actual result of a trade Mission will still be unexpected making it a worthwhile gamble to take in this example you can get out of a war if you captured a hostage during combat a good example of the Loosely coupled events I mentioned earlier in this example based on a story from Livy of a meeting between Hannibal and Scipio Africanus after the end of the Second Punic War you're you're forced to choose who is the best General either one of your own or one of theirs you must choose between damaging your own legitimacy or angering your guest these incidents stir the pot of

diplomacy of diplomacy and make the game much more dynamic here Rome is offering you one of its unique units a status as a mercenary and this is a good example of something we'd be afraid to put on the bargaining table because it would be abusable but it works fine as a random event which isn't guaranteed to appear now here is the great Beast the biggest design challenge for every Forex out there how to bring the game to a satisfying conclusion after hundreds of turns and an Untold perhaps embarrassing number of hours in front of the computer I I view Victory conditions as a necessary evil for a while for a while I had hoped that maybe we could but for Old World maybe we could do away with them all together like the Paradox Grand strategy games do no one really cares about winning or losing those games it's all about the experience man so maybe all maybe

Victory conditions had become old-fashioned maybe I was old-fashioned the truth is that games like Crusader Kings and Europa universalis are really more like simulations than they are like games and one important fact about Forex games is that they are gammes games players expect to win or give up trying and one thing I did not want to inherit from the sims series was theme victories another thing that I helped get rolling back with Civ 3 which added cultural and diplomatic victories to the traditional conquest and space race the problem with theme victories is that because they require a high bar the player has to aim for them early on which warps all the decisions made over the course of the game aiming for the religious Victory make sure to always make the religious Choice each time you get it as an option thus I needed something more well generic and I needed it quickly because we were playing old world as a multiplayer game within the first six months of the project

so I went for the most boring solution possible victory points and it worked out surprisingly well the reason it worked is because we tied them to City Sites which were a known quantity because we determined how many City Sites there were at the beginning of the game if a Forex game without sea sites had a victory condition that simply required exodies to win then it's no mystery what would happen the game would have the worst case of ICS ever as players would be cramming cities in every nook and cranny possible instead because we knew that a specific map had only say 30 sites on it it became easy to pick some threshold which would trigger victory of course while Vector points are a perfectly serviceable way a perfectly serviceable win condition they highly sorry they hardly fire the imagination so we needed something a little more interesting a little more thematic

I wanted a victory condition that dynamically told the story of your Dynasty and hopefully even pushed you to play a little differently I found my inspiration for that for that from Jetpack Joyride which had a mission system that encouraged you to achieve one of three random goals often ones that force you to play the game quite differently our initial ambition system worked basically exactly like this three random Ambitions which give a bonus upon completion and get replaced by slightly more difficult ones eventually we made these part of the character system as the Ambitions would be attached to your leader similar to how it works in Crusader Kings further the Ambitions that come up would be related to the current game state in this case the leader is a builder so she gets Ambitions to build wonders however they were not initially part of the victory system foreign reason I tried turning Ambitions into a

victory condition was actually I was trying to save the original name of the game 10 crowns the name initially meant that you had 10 lives to play the game 10 rulers before the game would end but that proved too hard to work out in practice as 10 rulers could last 50 turns or they could last 500. thus I tried to retcon the name by renaming Ambitions to crowns and then Victory conditions would be right there in the title however the team didn't buy it and we of course shipped with a different name when we ran the trademark search for old world we got this one line note from our lawyer that some company called Amazon had reserved the the word new world for some upcoming video game I actually didn't give it much thought because how often does Amazon actually ship their games [Laughter] so yeah it was it was fun trying to spend the end of last year explaining on Twitch that we weren't some weird

prequel to New World so what about the AI the game would be called Old World and we now had a simple thematic recognition fulfill 10 Ambitions picked by the rulers of your Dynasty and win the game however one issue I've often seen with themed victories in sieve is that because they focus on internal progress that is not visible to other players when one player achieves a cultural or religious or scientific victory it can come as quite a surprise and I don't believe a player should ever be surprised by a you just lost pop-up pop-up after a 20-hour game so we made the simple decision that the AI could not win via Ambitions they could only win with victory points which are much more straightforward and always visible in the upper left corner this type of asymmetry is actually a bit unusual in the Forex game where the AIS are ostensibly supposed to be stand in

for human players but that's always been a myth players don't actually want the AIS to behave like humans as a simple example real human players would usually all gang up on another player who is coming close to Victory regardless of previous relationships however if you have the AI behave that way players will accuse it of treating the human unfairly or of not letting the wind fair and square there's nothing inherently better about symmetric design indeed I'd say much of the most interesting work in the tabletop Renaissance is with deeply asymmetrical games like root or the coin series once we broke the Seal of asymmetry it opened up the design space significantly the AI for example doesn't get events because we wanted events to have meaningful results that significantly impacted the game it's okay for one of your events to end a war because you convinced the ai's heir to seize the throne however it

wouldn't be okay for that to happen to you just because the AI quote unquote drew that event trust me that may sound interesting theoretically but it's not going to go down well with players further without symmetry we could rethink difficulty levels instead of giving the AI bonuses like faster research or cheaper troops we simply start the AI with more cities than you thematically you are a new nation in an Old World someone like Rome was in the 4th Century BC you know a small Kingdom centered on one city and surrounded by a larger more ancient empire like Greece Egypt Persia and Carthage thus the AI and Old World plays without any bonuses or cheats at all simply with a significant Head Start depending on the difficulty level we felt players would enjoy knowing the AI was playing by the same rules as the player while also finding a way to chat uh also finding a way to provide a challenge for veterans

maybe this is a better animal themed metaphor for where I am now as a designer I've gone deep on Forex games during my career I probably know more about these type of games what works and what doesn't work then is really healthy for a person my my design Journey with the old world was truly about putting that knowledge to good use to not let it go to waste so that we could push the genre forward in an intelligent considered way often the best source of innovation is from New Blood coming into the industry with new ideas but I'd like I hope my work can now show that it's it's possible to innovate after 22 years in the industry as long as you're willing to give an honest assessment of what parts of your games have been making players lives better and which parts have been making them worse many of the mechanics and systems from Civ that I've rejected with old world are ones that I came up with myself the bargaining table theme victories cultural borders strategic resources these are all ideas I pushed for when I was 24 just out of college

old world is a conversation with myself as a younger designer and I feel fortunate that I got the opportunity to have that conversation opportunities like this don't come along every day thank you [Applause] and it looks like we have about 10 minutes for questions so I'd be happy to answer any thank you go to the talk um there's this uh tendency I have as a gamer to try to optimize things um and to an extent I really enjoy it right sure and uh personally I feel that when you know at the beginning of a match say I want to make a concrete plan about like okay I'm gonna do uh Conquest Victory or something like that and then a series of randomized events come up that sort of forced me to pull away from that strategy particularly in single player I

feel kind of like well game come on man like you got to work with me here a little bit um or I sometimes feel like well these don't matter because I'm still going to do my own thing um did you run into that sort of feedback or or challenge while developing and if so like what measures did you put in place to better enable that type of player um to enable the type of player who wants to aim to play a certain way yeah to like aim to play a certain way and to master a certain strategy so I don't play the Forex game so much but more so like the the real-time strategy games like sharecraft and like if I want a turtle behind cannons as protoss like that's not an optimal strategy but it's like the thing that I want to do it would be nice if the game would facilitate me doing that something sure yeah so we don't so we don't have you know traditional theme victories right there's no cultural scientific or whatever victory but the game is reactive to what you do right like we do have Ambitions and it's

not just 10 random Ambitions I guess I probably didn't go into this too much but the ambition system is going to feed your Ambitions based off of the fam first of all the families that you chose you know for your nation like you might have chosen the Champions over the Traders and the Champions are going to come forward and they're going to be we're going to prefer it if you do Conquest style Ambitions and actually even we've been working with the writing team a lot recently actually to as much as possible have the Ambitions come through the event system right so you might you know there might have been a you know a an invasion from the vandals and they pillaged a bunch of your tiles and because of that you now have an ambition to destroy four Vandal camps right um so and then there's other ones like you have a builder I think I guess I show that you know you have a builder leader that Builder is going to want to build wonders and presumably you have a builder leader because before you when you decide how that that when that character was like a teenager I want that character to study civics or something right and then they become so

it's like the game the emissions you get are going to kind of react to the decisions you make so it's kind of building it on the Fly that makes sense very cool thanks all right good hey thanks for the talk it was great uh and save three is one of the early early games that was influential to me so really great to see you talking about the things that you were not happy about that game and sort of deconstructing you know patterns and tropes in the Forex genre and seeing if there are other things that can be done and I was wondering are there any other tropes in the Forex genre or patterns that you see where you're like I don't know if that's necessary I would like to see a game that doesn't do X or does something else differently um maybe tiles um that's a tough one because I I think I literally in my civ4 GC postmortem I put a thing saying like civ4 is not a turn-based game it's a tile based game everything's about tiles right but um there is a major cost for tiles like pretty much all of the all of the stuff

all the micromanagement at some level has something to do with tiles right and if you wanted to make a game what you're really caring more about is the story and the diplomacy and the interactions and you know the territories are different and you're making choices but they're not you know they're not they're not as fiddly so maybe the game could go a lot faster like you maybe want to move to some sort of like true region system right um and get you know get the player away from from going through tiles but that's you know I'm not gonna do that for the early decades so I'm ready to I'm ready to do something else great thank you hello uh you talked earlier in the presentation about anytime you have automation being incorporated into the game yep it being a red flag potentially yep and one thing I was curious on is I went to like another thing that uh talked earlier that was completely different genres with completely different things I was talking about that I was talking about how automation

was also an opportunity for accessibility for features that weren't necessarily problematic I was kind of curious uh where you thought was an appropriate area if any to leave automation sure in versus the areas that were those red flags that should be reevaluated sure um I mean so first of all there's never any hard and fast game design rules like that's that's always the case whatever I tell you here there's a very good chance it doesn't apply to your specific game for for whatever reason um but um I mean if the system by itself was supposed to be fun like engaging with where you know if workers were actually supposed to be fun then if turning that off is you know if players want to turn it off then there's there's a problem I I think that worker automation is definitely not as problematic as citizen Automation in Civ games where it really feels like at this point Civ is at a

point where they kind of it's kind of like it's their um the skeleton in their closet they're they're like you know like please just don't ever touch this we promise we'll we'll you won't have to worry about it just just please don't you know and um so like I think that system really really needs to be rethought and so that that's a big problem but I'm sure there there's games with which forever reason automation why it might be appropriate yep thank you like I said red flag right something to make yourself ask questions all right good great talk um so you talked earlier about how you have these City Sites The Limited number of cities and not uh we presented that as a solution to the infinite City scroll it seems to me that the solution like the optimal play would still be to put a city on every city site it's just instead of every tile it's every city site and it doesn't really change the nature of that decision all that much I'm curious what your response to that oh

yeah yeah no I mean so you're you're partially correct right like that there's sort of two ways to look at this problem one is is there does Civ have an expansion problem which is the best option is always to keep building more settlers right that's one part of the problem the other part of the problem is okay fine you should build as many as impossible and you should also squeeze your cities in together as much as possible so that the end result is as you know twice as many cities as your opponent or whatever like those those are similar problems but they're actually different okay right and we kind of approached both of those problems in different ways right like we more or less got rid of the whole city cramming problem with City Sites that's what his intention is but every city site in the game has not every but basically most of the seasides of the game have a little um tribal camp on them so you know you actually have to do some conquests before you can sell on them so you can't do a pure just settler spam but here's the thing I'll say that like

we do actually there has been this debate about like wide versus tall you know and Civ games and I'm I I I actually don't really like that debate all that much a Forex game is an expansionist game like period right like you you put yourself in a very difficult position if you're trying to make the rules work so having a few cities can just be as viable as having a lot of cities right the the thing that should pressure you not to have you know to that limits your expansion is the other the other Empires right so like it's you know because these two problems are so linked you know we've often kind of thought of the same thing but like you know like expanding out making conquests getting territory it's good it's hard to make a game and I I think it kind of like you're you're rubbing the cat the wrong way if you find out a way to like punish players essentially for doing that hello I just have a curiosity

um you were talking about how you're trying to limit the cities that players build um limit the number of them that they build I haven't played any of the Civic games but I have played Alpha Centauri which is you know the same idea sure good yeah um and if you let if you do it the game once and let the game automate your terraformers you're going to end up with a carpet of roads on every possible place that a road could be built um and you mentioned building roads in this game and I'm wondering just what your thoughts are on uh placement of roads and what kind of thoughts you put into that sure yeah free roads have been a problem in a lot of Civ games where you know at some point and this this very much comes into the order system right where you know in in Civ and Alpha Atari you got your workers there's no downside to doing something with every turn at some point all the titles get filled up so well what do I do with these workers I might as well use them I guess I'll just fill them with roads next right so that's that's exactly why we have the order system right and it's not just that is also the stockpile system right like so every road you build an old world

costs you an order well probably two you move there and you build the road and that also costs you some Stone right so now it's a choice and you're not just going to build roads arbitrarily so when you play Old World you actually see Road look Road networks that look natural because people are they want to use their orders for other things they want to connect their cities and then use those orders for something else cool makes sense I thought I think we're out of time I also need to remind everyone please please rate the talk you can choose what you want but the higher rating would be nice cool all right thank you [Music]