Troy Goodfellow:	How did you find the advisors for the animated council? Why do it that way in any case?
Brian Reynolds:	At the time Microprose had created a “multimedia department” featuring Michael Ely, Tim Train, and Jason Coleman, with the idea being to find ways to get better movies and visuals into the games. These guys had already done some really cool film stuff for a “Colonization Gold” edition which sadly never saw the light of day, and we decided that multimedia was a good cost-effective way to get some pizzazz into the game. I don’t actually remember where we came up with the actors for those things, but I thought they had a great Civ flavor. On the subject of the multimedia guys, they also deserve credit for what I thought was the single best audio-visual idea for the entire product: Wonder Movies. Those little Ken-Burns-style pan-and-scans and footage clips made great payoffs when players completed wonders, and they fit perfectly with the importance in the game for wonders. So often games will reward players with great audio visuals for doing almost nothing, or players will struggle against a mighty challenge and see little payoff. I thought the wonder movies were perfectly balanced in being a nice payoff for a significant undertaking, and they came at a reasonable pace and fit aesthetically with the game story as well! On top of that they were cheap cheap cheap to produce! Mostly we licensed stock footage and photos and relied on the editing talents of the multimedia guys, who also put in some of the latest nights of the team because they had to babysit the Premiere program that compiled the movies. Those Wonder movies were so great that I really pushed hard to get them included in Alpha Centauri as well – it just seemed like too much of a step backward not to include wonder movies, plus they were so helpful in creating a feeling of depth to the science fiction world of the game. But there wasn’t exactly a lot of stock footage available for science fiction scenes (we did manage to license some footage from Baraka like that chickens-down-the-conveyor-belt scene), so they were quite expensive, and I’m not all that surprised the concept was dropped from Civ3 – it probably just got too expensive, although I’d love to see the old Civ2-style ones (or those movies exactly) included in a future edition as a minor flourish.
Troy Goodfellow:	Civ II had more of everything – more civs, each with two leaders, new units, new techs…was “more” a philosophy going in?
Brian Reynolds:	Yes actually it was. Most of us realize that “more” isn’t always better in game design & sequels, and indeed after a series of sequels it is easy for a game system to become so choked with features and materials that new players can’t actually understand it and even old ones are overwhelmed. But Civ2 was the first sequel in the series, so there was a lot of room to add new things, plus it had been 5 years since the game’s original release and the fans had developed a huge and well-thought-out wishlist (there was a Civ 2 wishlist in the USENET newsgroups at the time, and I got in touch with the list’s maintainer and traded e-mails for a while: there were some great fan ideas which we did indeed incorporate into Civ2). One of our guiding philosophies for Civ2 was to try to fill out areas which had been “sketched in broad strokes” in Civ1. This applied not only to the game design (e.g. adding health bars and related concepts to combat) but also to filling in additional unit and technology types which felt “missing”. In a similar vein we worked on what were perceived as gaps in the AI – for example the AI players actually built their Wonders and Caravans honestly (no more of the much-complained-about insta-cheating of wonders and caravans), they put serious effort into their space-races, players built up a “reputation” when treating other countries badly (so bullies didn’t get to start with a clean slate with each new victim), and the computer was less apt to fall for the “fortify a bunch of units right next to your capital city” ploy (the two-square “buffer zone” during peace-time which eventually evolved into the national borders in Alpha Centauri). Adding “more” isn’t always the right approach (and designers of future Civ installments may very well need to look for ways to add “less” or at least replace older things with newer things), but I think it was just right for Civ 2 given where the franchise was at the time. I think it was exactly what the fans were slavering for, and boy did they ever slaver.

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