Intelligent design

After living together with Civlization V for a few weeks, the sparkle of love at the first sight starts to fade, revealing her strange habits and weird friends.

Scientific research and technology is a curious thing in Civilization. The player can select a certain piece of technology (the wheel, compass, acoustics, computers…) to research. The tech will enable the player to build something, or gives static bonuses or abilities to cities or units. The technologies advance in a tree-like fashion, which enables the player to advance very far in one branch, leaving other, older technologies unresearched. One of my civilizations had nuclear fission without the aid of electricity. This tends to break immersion somewhat: Even within one civilization, the different levels of technology are radically apart, if the player wants. And all technologies must be researched at some point; Despite my fission power, I had to research electricity to research ecology.

Another thing is the civilization itself. Right after realizing that one can grow food by putting seeds into ground, a small tribe in a faraway land declared themselves the Mongols, deciding to put fear into small city-states. From that moment on, through thousands of years of history, the Mongols stay Mongols. I’m not a historian, but I’m pretty sure the nations in Civilization V did not spawn into existence as themselves, but instead evolved organically. Now every nation feels more or less the same; Every one has the same tech tree, the same pool of social policies and same buildings. There are special units available, but technological progress usually makes them obsolete very fast. The wonders are also quite arbitrary; London can have Taj Mahal, Statue of Liberty, library of Alexandria and the Great Wall, despite that every one of those wonders was originally built for very specific, cultural reasons.

Effectively, the game has the same problems as Spore; It does not evolve organically. Instead, the player just slaps on the most efficient blocks, making the civilization a mess of different concepts. Let’s fix this, by creating The Realistic Civilization.

At the beginning of the game, the player does not get to select a civilization. For now, he only has a unit of warriors and a settler. The first thing he or she does is install a city somewhere. The game, based on the immidiate surroundings of the city, calculates different research points. There are deers, some forests and a sea nearby. The game prompts the player to select research. He can select one of three things: Hunting, animal husbandry or fishing. The research times are different, depending on the research points. The player selects hunting. A countdown to new technology appears in the UI. The computer gives new technologies, analoguous to the old technologies, by calculating the player’s technological orientation and available resources.

There are several Main Technologies that every culture gains with time. Writing and Navigation are good examples. Then there are Situational Technologies. These are dependant on the civilizations surroundings and preferences. If there are no horses in the player’s empire, the player does not research Horseback Riding, and can’t have anything inherited from that technology. As the player’s science progresses, the player unlocks Situational Technologies, enabling more buildings and units. The Main Technologies represent the player’s overall technological prowess.

Next, the player selects new construction. At the beginning, there are roughly two types of buildings: Practical buildings and Social buildings. Practical buildings help the civilization concretely, giving more food, better production etc.. Social buildings improve the people, giving out more happiness and culture. Building a practical building makes the people more practical and level-headed, making future Social buildings slightly more expensive. This represents cultural evolution. The player can buy social policies as normal, but they are very mutually exclusive, and only in modern times can one evolve into a multicultural civilization.

When the player selects his or her first social policy, the civilization has evolved enough to become a distinct nation. The game gives the player three closest civilization identities to choose from, based on his current values. The player then chooses one and keeps it for the rest of the game. These identities are the nations from the main game.

Now the game is a bit more organic, and the civilizations have more personality. When the player encounters a new civilization, he says “Ooh, it has evolved in that direction” instead of “Ooh, it is at that tech level”.

Diabolic Tutorial

Not a newbie-friendly game

As I mentioned, I bought Civilization V last weekend. And yesterday I decided to finally Civilize myself. The last time I had touched the series was with Civ II, some decade ago. My memories were vague, but the most intimidating part of the game was clearly looming in my mind: The walls and walls of text. Not gameplay-related text.

After watching the rather uplifting intro movie I was apprehensive. It is a deep turn-based game. Those are usually quite punishing and complex. How am I going to learn to play it before I get tired and confused? Then I reminded myself that I have to manage a lot more complex systems when I play multiplayer matches of Magic with my Norin the Wary-deck. But that brief moment was illuminating: I was new player who had somehow managed to purchase the game without (much) prior knowledge of the series. A perfect time to observe how Firaxis handles the new virgins.

I found a tutorial. It was the bottom-most selection in the New Game-menu, which did not feel like the most intuitive solution. Usually the tutorial is situated in the main menu and is made to clearly stand out so that anyone new would be drawn to its friendly name and promise of information. Clicking it took me to another menu, where there were several smaller buttons and one big one on the top. Without reading I assumed that the biggest button was there to lure the new players to it and would offer perhaps some larger tutorial where every small thing is explained in excruciating detail and a slow-speaking voiceover.

I was wrong. The game immidiately launched, giving me Persia as my empire (?), showing my special attributes (?) and telling me that the game world was “small”. Then it entered the main game screen, showing a pretty, if confusing world screen and two units (?). An advisor popped up, telling me to found a city and explore. I clicked on a question “How do I move” or something. The game slapped a screen with text and an eternally looping maze of choices which would result in more text. Instinctively I closed the screen, with images of hundreds of thousands of informative words waiting for my focused attention like a flight of ravenous vampire bats. I wanted to play a game, not read an operating manual for a jet plane!

At that point my Fantasy Wars-reflexes kicked in and memories from many years ago flooded my mind. The details of the next few hours are quite hazy, but sometime after midnight I had conquered the only opposing civilization and ruled the tiny planet with a fist of unknown hardness. But in the end, I had managed the complex system with lots of previous knowledge, and still had unanswered questions. Although an enjoyable experience, I was worried that if the tutorial was just a small easy mode, how would new people integrate themselves into the game easily?

To be fair, there were several more detailed tutorials below the tutorial game-button, which explained the general concepts quite nicely. But the UI and the city production symbols were never explained. The movement tutorial never explicitly stated what buttons I should press to make the unit move! That, if anything, is a colossal failure. I found the unit order menu with common UI placement knowledge. And what’s worse, right-clicking apparently commands the units directly, NOT terminate a current order mode! I accidentally ordered my unit to move when I wanted to cancel the movement target selection and choose another one! City management was explained, but the explanations were in the perverse help menu hell which did not have any direct explanations for the symbols the game uses. Everything I learned with either backwards-engineering or previous knowledge.

If there is a game that would benefit from a detailed tutorial that explains everything, starting with how to move the mouse, it would be this. The Civilization series is (apparently, I need at just one more turn to be certain myself) excellent and well-recognised. I would say that it would be a great aide for teaching Human history. But for the non-Civ-addicts to understand it, they would need to play it. And to do that, they need a simple tutorial that assumes that the person in front of the screen knows nothing of games.