NOTE: This is The Column, a regular feature on Apolyton where anyone can write about anything to do with Civilization or the gaming industry as a whole. If you feel like writing, please visit the article submission page.

PREVIOUS ARTICLES

#203 CIVIII'S BIG MISTAKES A disheartened fan sends a letter of grave concern to Firaxis #202 CIVIII WILL DESTROY FREE WORLD As if Civ couldn't get any more addictive? It didn't #201 THE SQUEAKY WHEEL GETS THE GREASE It's a matter of fiction... or is it? #200 CIVIII: ICS EMBRACED The origins and future of "Infinite City Sleaze" #199 WHAT CIV IS NOT There's whole incredible world beyond our computers #198 THE NATURE OF SEQUELS A really extensive review of some of the biggest games series COLUMN ARCHIVE

I've been playing Civ for a-year-and-a-half now. I work as a professional chess player and writer with a daily and Sunday column in England and as a result was lucky enough to be able to arrange to interview Sid Meier and Soren Johnson on Wednesday in London.

    A complete interview should come out at some point and I'll flag it here when it does but for the moment here's a summary of the technical stuff. I'm sure that a lot of the material has appeared before and apologise for duplication and if it's too dry.

Jon


The Code
-----------------------------
    The game is written is C++ and has "hundreds of thousands" of lines of code. There are 70 or 80 modules and some individual ones have 10,000 lines plus.

AI
-----------------------------
    Soren was in charge of the AI and it took "7 or 8 months of his time to write it about half writing and then half testing." He'd set the AI to play against itself for ten minutes, and then rewrite as necc. He also tried playing against it himself, of course.

Levels
-----------------------------
    The house rule is that they test the game at Regent level. Anecdotally, they believe that people start at a lowish level and then work their way up until it becomes too difficult.

    They've deliberately made the step up in difficulty level steeper than in CivII (and I think it's generally agreed that they've succeeded).

    I asked about the perception that the patches have partly been designed with the macho intent of preventing players using "loopholes" to win at high levels and Soren said that it depended on whether they thought that the strategy was "fair". He mentioned the de and re-reforestation ploy which worked originally and was then eliminated and said that he thought that "wasn't much fun."

Map Generator
-----------------------------

    This is based on a fractal algorithm "which has acquired a life of its own" Soren feels that it produces "more interesting" maps than in CivII (which I feel may well be true when you have an overview of the whole thing as they have always been able to do: but isn't at all necessarily true from a player's point of view).

    There are no plans to change it and they agreed that we'd just have to hit the quick restart button if a starting position was too bad. Soren said that people seemed "unwilling to move a few squares from a mountain say to get a reasonable start" but I countered with being in the middle of a jungle...

Units / Bombardment
-----------------------------
    As posted here before, they do indeed intend to add a flag in the next editor so that you can choose whether some units can bombard fatally. There are no plans to change the official value of other units which "are about right".

Combat
-----------------------------
    As they pointed out it can't really be "more random" than in CivII (mathematically something is either random or not): but of course if "spearman beats tank" is 1 in 100 in CivII it's clearly higher in CivIII. They reiterated that they "didn't want the result to be totally dependent on who controlled vital resources such as oil" so had to reduce the certainty that modern units would defeat older ones.

Last Unit
-----------------------------
    The widespread perception that the last unit in a city acquires magical powers is false. Sid said that this did happen though in CivI when Barbarians attacked a city since it was "so annoying" to lose a city to them: which is where the idea may have come from.

    Talking of Barbarians: The delightful attacks of 20 horsemen at a time in "raging hordes" were partly derived form the idea of the Mongols erupting.

Corruption
-----------------------------
    They went out of their way again to express their admiration for the mod community but there are no plans to incorporate any of the new buildings or whatever in the official version - though of course post patch police stations now do help.

Nationality
-----------------------------
    The idea was derived from synthesising three different streams of thought from Sid, Soren and Jeff Briggs.

National Boundaries
-----------------------------
    There were "about 20 different versions" of this before the one they finally came up with.

Wish list
-----------------------------
    I hassled them about my own bugbear - why not an Attitude Advisor like in CivII so that you can see really clearly who is revolting (rather than by peering at the Domestic Advisor screen) - and even an "auto-devolt" function.

    Soren always plays with "Manage Citizens' Moods" on (which means that after one turn of revolt the city is automatically pacified and so partially deals with the problem).

Favourite Civs
-----------------------------
    Sid went for the Romans: he likes the "military and building skills" which go all the way back to CivI

    Soren likes the Babylonians for the Science - and likes sometimes to play at Monarch (rather than the house standard of Regent) because "while Regent is fair humans do have an advantage".


---------
About the author: Civer, chess player and writer

© 2002 Jonathan Speelman.
Not be re-produced without the authorization of the writer

Comment on this article!

The opinions expressed on this page do not necessarily reflect those of Apolyton CS or GameStats. They are just the personal opinions of the writer.