Sujet: Les Podcast Officiels de Civilization V (Lu 5050 fois)

Bot · « **le:** 10 Juil 2010 à 23:49 »

Fil de discussions sur les Podcasts officiels de Firaxis - Civilization 5.

Les Podcasts sont écoutable (en anglais) sur le site officiel de Civilization V : Civilization5.com

Liste des Podcasts :

Les transcriptions (en anglais) sont mises en Spoiler pour pouvoir être traduites facilement via des outils de traductions comme ceux de google. (ce qui n'est pas possible sur leur site)

Bot · « **Réponse #1 le:** 11 Juil 2010 à 00:04 »

Episode 1 : Bienvenue à Civilization V

L’équipe de développement Firaxis nous présente le dernier né de la célèbre franchise et nous en dit un peu plus sur l’histoire du jeu et les éléments clés de la conception de Civilization V.

Bot · « **Réponse #2 le:** 11 Juil 2010 à 01:45 »

Episode 2 : Le graphisme de Civilization V

Dans ce deuxième podcast, Elizabeth reçois Dorian Newcomb ( Lead Artist ) et Arne Schmidt ( Building and Structures Lead ) pour discuter autour de l'apparence et de l'interface du jeu.

Bot · « **Réponse #3 le:** 11 Juil 2010 à 01:52 »

Episode 3 : Les personnages de Civilization V

Elizabeth, Brian Busatti (Lead Modeler and Environment Artist), Chris Hickman (Lead Animator) parlent des personnages de Civilization V et comment ils ont essayé de les rendre plus interactifs, plus plausible et plus réalistes que dans les précédentes éditions.

Bot · « **Réponse #4 le:** 11 Juil 2010 à 01:56 »

Episode 4 : Une immersion sonore plus réaliste

Elizabeth s'assoie avec l'équipe de développement pour parler des sons et musiques de Civilization V et comment ils espèrent donner plus de vie au jeu et d'immersion au joueur en faisant une ambiance sonore plus globale que dans les précédentes versions.

Bot · « **Réponse #5 le:** 17 Juil 2010 à 19:45 »

Episode 5 : Un nouveau moteur pour le jeu, mais pourquoi ?

Elizabeth parle avec une partie de l'équipe qui a créé le nouveau moteur du jeu afin d’expliquer pourquoi ils ont préféré créer un nouveau moteur plutôt que de se servir de l'existant.

Bot · « **Réponse #6 le:** 27 Juil 2010 à 12:41 »

Episode 6 : L'interface utilisateur

Elizabeth recois Mark Myer, le programmeur de l'U.I., et Russel Vicaro, le graphiste de l'U.I. qui nous parlent du comment et du pourquoi l'interface utilisateur ( U.I ) est une des parties fondamentale du jeu.

Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to the Civilization V Podcast Series. I’m Elizabeth Tobey, and today I’m talking with Marc Myer, Lead User Interface Programmer, and Russel Vicaro, Lead User Interface Artist, about the how and why of one of the most fundamental parts of any Civ game: The UI. Being able to navigate the UI quickly and effectively is key to having an enjoyable gameplay experience, especially with a strategy game as involved and in depth as Civilization V. For this iteration of the series, the team not only revamped how things were organized to streamline and simplify the plethora of options, but they also paid particular attention to the aesthetics of the UI to make the game visually cohesive.

In the beginning, Russell didn’t have a ton to go on. He was given images of the game, and of concept art that was informing the entire look of Civilization V, and told to run with it, and make the UI echo these images.

Russell Vaccaro: Dorian came to me – he’s the lead artist, which, you probably know about him – with paintings of how he envisioned the landscape looking. They were very painterly. So what I wanted was something to frame that nicely. I also wanted something that was different than pas Civs. Something that I really like is the art deco style. So I took two months and I kind of modeled and drew, painted – I just did everything I could to find out what it is to be art deco. I researched and during that time – let’s see what else I did – played a lot of Civ IV and took notes on things I would like to do to make this more accessible to every player instead of just what’s termed as like hardcore. That’s where the look and feel came for the UI and I’ve been getting really great response from it. Then we had the issue of thousands of icons. So early on I was finding these really beautiful posters in the art deco style. There tend to be - there’s like several different styles that show up. Each one just reeks of art deco so I wanted to have each icon look as good as those posters. Unfortunately, creating the UI and doing those icons as beautiful as I wanted required me to hire somebody else to do those beautiful icons that I wanted to do. We were very fortunate to get a painter from the Maryland Institute of College of Art, Jason Pastrana. He came on and started creating these icons about a year ago, and he’s just about finished. And he’s doing a wonderful job.

ET: Designing hundreds of buttons aside, Russell’s explanation on how they technically created the look for the game’s UI brings up another important point – usability. There are dozens of menus and buttons for a player to use and even to the veteran Civ player, sometimes all these icons and options can be daunting. For Civilization V, the team reinvisioned how information was conveyed to the player - allowing the gamer to decide when to act on certain events and pay attention to pieces of the game at his own speed. The notification system puts all the tools and information necessary to conquer the world into your hands and empowers you to act rather than confusing you.

Marc Meyer: Well we wanted to make sure that the player wasn’t overwhelmed with information. I mean there’s so much going on in Civ we wanted to make sure that the player could pick it up and play with it without feeling like they needed to read a huge manual or do research on what everything meant. So the notifications sort of replace some of the popups we used to have where anytime something important happens in the game you get a small icon to let you know that something’s going on. When you wanna know what that is you can go and look into it rather than being confronted with something immediately that you have to deal with. So it’s sort of speeding up flow and kind of letting people stay in the game a little bit more rather than being pulled out to some piece of UI.

RV: And the way the UI is presented to you throughout the game, it’s more of an additive. Instead of having everything available at once, as it becomes available, that part of the UI will show up or say, “hey look at me” so…

MM: Yeah over time the city screen will get more and more complicated as you get bigger population and more options are available to you. As you build new buildings you’ll see more things showing up in there.

RV: Yeah it kind of grows while you’re learning.

ET: Like with all good games, the UI wasn’t born overnight. Both the look and the usability went through countless iterations and revisions before a final design was decided. And while the UI has always been an iterative process for every development team I’ve worked with, I thought Firaxis’ flow might be even more so. Their studio is very iterative in every aspect of their design – so it made sense to me that something so large as a UI overhaul would have a unique process.

MM: We’ve had a lot of back and forth, a lot of iterations on the screens that are in the game. With a lot of stuff, either Russell or myself will put something in initially and then it kinda bounces back and forth between the two of us for a long time where he’ll be adding in more details and more features to the components of the screen then I’ll go in and hook up the pieces of logic that populate everything. So we’ve bounced things back and forth quite a few times.

RV: We’ve been able to eliminate a bottleneck where the artist has to use a tool and then – so the programmers and designers are always waiting for artist to make this screen, export it, and get it into the game. The process that Marc created now, everything is done in XML, so when John needs a screen, he makes it. When a programmer needs something, they make it. So everybody’s been able to make the screens and then I go in and pretty them up. I hafta say I’m doing much more coding than I thought I would ever do as an artist but it seems to work. As far as the iterations go, everyone’s able to make changes without any bottleneck and it’s been beautiful. I don’t think we even realize how beautiful it is because it’s just been so seamless. But I remember on my last project just there being a bottleneck there and I felt as if I couldn’t make everybody happy because couldn’t get to everyone’s screen quick enough, but this way takes care of that.

MM: Yeah we built a whole new system from the ground up using XML and LUA and so we have one great advantage where we’re able to hotload those files as we change them. While the game is running we can modify the user interface and hotload those screens and see our changes immediately which has just been a huge, huge thing for us. We’ve been able to do so many more iterations because we don’t hafta wait on an export, we don’t have to wait on a compile. We just see our changes right away, so we’ve been able to really really polish up a lot of our interface.

ET: Before I let Marc and Russell leave the recording studio (at the time of this recording, the UI was still definitely in flux, and they had quite a bit of work to do) I asked them how they wanted people to feel about the final user interface. So far, press and community had said quite a bit about the bits and pieces of UI they had seen (I’ll take a moment to tip my proverbial hat to you diehards out there that deciphered screenshots and video stills with amazing skill and speed.) With so much time and energy poured into creating a system that was a keystone for all of Civilization V, I couldn’t imagine they didn’t have hopes and dreams of some kind for how gamers would receive their work.

MM: Yeah for me I would definitely want them to not notice it because it’s so functional. I would love for it to just work for everyone and them to have the data they need when they need it but to not be intimidated by it.

RV: I want them to think like I thought when I played Warcraft 2. “This is just the best interface ever.” It just has the most beautiful icons that I love, and I can’t wait for people to see them. I think ten years from now I really believe people are gonna be like, “remember those icons from Civ V?” They all had a similar theme and there were thousands of them and I felt they all came from the same game. I also agree with Marc. I hope that the interface is so seamless that it’ll take you a while to like appreciate it. And if you do, you’ll love it hopefully.

Bot · « **Réponse #7 le:** 27 Août 2010 à 23:46 »

Episode 7 : Batailles et Combats

Ed Beach ( Lead AI et Gameplay Programmer ), et Jon Shafer ( Lead Designer ), parlent avec Elizabeth d'un des aspects les plus importants du gameplay de Civilization : Les Batailles et Combats.

Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to the seventh episode of the Civilization V podcast series. I’m Elizabeth Tobey, and today Ed Beach, Lead AI and Gameplay Programmer, and Jon Shafer, Lead Designer, shed some light on one of the most important aspects of Civilization gameplay: Battles and combat. As I’m sure you are well aware by now, combat in Civ V is different from any other game in the series: Units don’t automatically die if they lose a battle, there are ranged units, and only one unit can occupy a tile at a time. And that short list is only scratching the surface of what combat is in the game. Such a drastic change surely was not made without serious thought and planning and considerable inspiration.

Ed Beach: Yeah that's a big one. The combat is probably going to be the element of Civilization V that stands out most to people in terms of how it's different from previous games. In previous games you would have large stacks of units on single tiles and you would send large stacks after other players' large stacks and cities. That's kind of a Civ staple in some ways but we're actually going a different direction with that. We're introducing something called “one unit per tile” where only one military unit can occupy a tile at one time. So what you'll see a lot more is units that have to work in concert with one another and front lines and that sort of thing. Just concepts that haven't been in Civilization before. Additionally there's a couple other big changes we're making. We're introducing ranged combat to the game. This wa s something that was in Civilization III but we're really expanding on it and in combination with one unit per tile it's really adding a lot more to the game so that's another thing we're really excited about and in order to accommodate the one unit per tile system we've also made it so that cities can defend themselves without a unit station there. So that makes them a little bit harder to take and also kind of swings things a little bit in the direction of defense where you're not gonna be completely screwed if somebody breaks through your front line.

Jon Shafer: I think the other thing to add is combat is now non-lethal. So when you attack a unit, he can sit and take that attack and still be in place and ready to continue to defend that terrain in case someone else is gonna come after him. So what you wanna do is often times to break an enemy line use two or three units in conjunction with each other, sometimes setting up a ranged attack to soften them up ahead of time. So there's a lot of kind of positional strategy in trying to get your attacks setup just right and having the right combination of two or three units to go in to take a key hex.

ET: Jon jumped in to a topic that is a big one for a lot of people. Combat is now not automatically the death of your unit. This not only significantly changes strategy, but also adds value to each unit. Since you can upgrade units as they gain experience and as you gain new technologies, a good player will find that they are still using their original warrior hundreds of turns in to the game. Albeit upgraded, but still the same unit. Keeping these units up to snuff takes more than skill in battle, however.

EB: I think one thing that's very different with the new combat system is you have to look at each of the targets that you're going after and kind of really analyze the terrain around them. A city that's in the middle of an open plain where you can get to it from all six sides is a much easier nut to crack than one that's on the coast maybe with a mountain range blocking access to it from one direction. Since you really need to use those joint attacks where you have two or three units cooperating together out of a couple different hexes to take down a city it's gonna be really tough in those areas where the terrain is restricted. You may have to – especially as the game progresses and you start building up your navy – use your naval units, maybe some of your ranged units, and the ranges get longer and longer as the game goes on – along with the land units and that combination may be what you actually use to take down a city.

JS: Yeah something that we wanted to make sure of is that naval units were more significant in this game. So something that we've done is all of the naval units are now ranged and they can actually hit on land as well. So they can bombard cities directly they can bombard units on the land directly. So if you have a large navy and the enemy doesn't, you have a pretty big advantage because you can roll up with your fleet and blow stuff up and he's not gonna be able to do much about it. In terms of overall philosophy, something that we wanted to do with Civ V and combat was in a lot of ways to reward action over inaction. So you'll see there are some defensive bonuses and certainly stationing units in terrain and setting things up appropriately is important but the commander who can put all the elements in his favor and build up an advantage on one side in terms of what units are stationed where or if you have an advantage in ranged units and can soften up the front line. It's much better to go into a war with an active strategy whether on offense or defense rather than just set units in fixed locations and then rely on them being strong enough to hold out forever. And that was something that you could do a lot of times with stacks because if you had a big enough stack with enough defensive modifiers then the enemy could just never break through it. You were almost, you know, impenetrable.

ET: Without stacks, another pressing question for Civ players is “what about my cities?!” Now, you can only have one unit defending each city, which at face value makes them sound weak and ineffective. However, combat is not always offensive – cities now can defend themselves, and you can build up defenses that will bolster their attacks and make them able to ward off even the heaviest of sieges – if you’re good enough, that is.

JS: As we mentioned, the cities can now defend themselves. So, like units, they have hit points. They actually have more than units because we didn't want them to fall too quickly. And they can be attacked both by ranged units as well as melee units like swordsmen or riflemen or whatever. So they're able to take some amount of abuse and if you support your city you can actually hold off against an offensive. In terms of the city itself, it actually has a ranged attack as well so it can shoot at incoming enemies and damage them or destroy them like another unit can so they can be pretty dangerous in that manner. You have to make sure you have enough units to break through and also to lay siege to the city while it's shooting at you. In terms of offense, you have to counter those advantages. You generally want ranged units that can hit it from a distance and do damage and wear it down so that your melee units when they actually go and attack the city directly don't take as much damage. If you have, let's say, just bunches and bunches of swordsmen, you might be able to take a city but you might suffer casualties or be seriously weakened by that. Whereas if you have a more mixed force with ranged units – especially siege units like catapults – you can knock the city down and take fewer losses that way.

EB: I think the last thing to add is that over time, if you're worried about defending your cities, you can upgrade them with a bunch of different buildings that can be put in the city starting with walls. Later you can add castles and military bases and so forth to continue to upgrade them and that's gonna make them harder to take, it's gonna make their defensive at tack back out of the city stronger. So even if you know that a certain city is on the border of your empire and very likely to come under attack you can plan ahead for that and go ahead and buff up its defenses so that it's not as vulnerable as it might be just sitting out there unprotected.

ET: It’s one thing to talk about these combat changes and to explain how everything works – but it’s another entirely to wrap your head around what everything Jon and Ed are saying. Since many old Civ tactics are now thrown out the window, I let the experts give a bit of insight into how new players can jump into combat in Civilization V with some good strategies under their belt.

EB: I think the first thing to keep in mind is that you're gonna want to use multiple units in conjunction like we were mentioning and a key part of that is that there's now a flank bonus that is given to an offensive player when he has additional units that are adjacent to the defender and then he makes an attack with one of those units. It actually also applies in defense if the person attacking you is surrounded by a bunch of your defending units you also get the same bonus. So, in general, thinking about the positional game of where your units are, are any of them vulnerable to being flanked on two or three sides. In all those types of situations, your units are not gonna perform as well and you're not gonna be as effective but if you can get those bonuses working for you then you're gonna have a much easier time.

JS: As an extension of that we mentioned that ranged units are a significant addition. They're actually fairly weak in melee combat though. So if somebody can get a melee unit into range to attack them, especially fast units like knights or horsemen or whatever, then they're very vulnerable to that. So you want to make sure that your ranged units are protected and they're not in the direct line of fire. Something that we have in Civ V is a form of zone of control. Players who've played maybe earlier versions of Civ or other strategic games that have that element will be familiar with that. But what that means in our game is if you move a unit from one tile adjacent to an enemy to another tile adjacent to that same enemy it uses up your turn, no matter how many movement points you have. Normally most units in our game have at least two movement points so you're losing some that way if that's your first move. It really restricts your flexibility so you want to deal with units on the front and you can't just slip through somebody's lines and get into their weak rear where they have ranged units or whatever.

ET: Now it’s time to switch gears. We’re still talking about combat, mind you, but in an entirely different light, because Civilization V is going to have a multiplayer component like none you’ve ever experienced in the past. For those of you who are now on the edge of their seats, I don’t want to get your hopes up – we’re not talking about the nitty gritty of multiplayer quite yet – however, Ed and Jon do have tips on how to approach combat when facing off against other Civ players.

JS: I think the most important thing is to keep in mind the tactics are going to be very important. You can't just stroll up with a big mass of units and expect to win against another human opponent especially. They'll know how to defend against that and they'll be ready to beat that so you have to make sure you're paying attention to what's going on on the map station your units appropriately. I also think scouting is gonna be a big deal because instead of having a big stack that just appears out of nowhere, you're gonna be able to see a large wave of units coming in advance. Especially against a human player you wanna be prepared for that. So having units stationed at different parts of the map near you in order to spot that big incoming wave will be really important. You're not gonna be able to hide your huge invasion force. It's gonna be all spread out and waiting for everybody to see it. And something else I mentioned is that I think boats will also be significant. They are ranged units so they're fairly powerful and if you can gain an advantage there or build up a fleet when somebody isn't expecting it you could have a large advantage that somebody is prepared for. So I think using the naval game will also be significant in multiplayer.

EB: Terrain certainly plays a role. Defending in any kind of rough or restricted terrain like hills or forest or jungle or even behind a river so if the attacker is coming across a river that's gonna provide a defensive bonus. Units out in the open are actually more vulnerable to attack.

JS: Yeah that's something new which is they are weaker – you know they get a penalty for being on flat land so you really wanna be careful where you put your units.

EB: And then there's some units that don't get to take advantage of the defensive bonuses like mounted units and so forth – those fast moving units. They're certainly very useful in combat, especially to get around an enemy's rear but you have to be very careful to protect them.

JS: Because ranged units are so important, something to keep an eye out for are hills. Hills allow your ranged units, if stationed on them, to shoot over other obstacles. Normally if you have a very dense forest your ranged units aren't going to be able to shoot as far as they normally can. However if they're on a hill they can actually restore their range so identifying hills and getting your ranged units on top of them will be something that's pretty important to winning.

Pete: So take the high ground.

JS: Yes.

EB: And if you can't put archers or other ranged units on them at least put scouts because then you'll at least know that the enemy is on its way.

Pete: So in your multiplayer game experiences, what's been your reaction to see this giant mass of units coming towards you? What do you do at that point?

JS: Um, you quit?

Pete: You rage quit. You heard it here folks!

ET: In case you didn’t recognize him, that’s Pete Murray, Marketing Associate at Firaxis. He’s always got the best one-liners during our podcasts.

ET: I started out this podcast by saying that I’d only scratched the surface of combat. Even now, we still haven’t gone through everything that combat holds in Civilization V – but the nuances within the game will vary depending on player and play style – I know that I speak for the entire team when I say that we are eagerly awaiting launch day when we can read everyone’s strategies and exclaim “I can’t believe I never thought of that!”

Bot · « **Réponse #8 le:** 08 Sep 2010 à 10:28 »

Episode 8 : L'I.A. de Civilization V.

Elizabeth Tobey reçois Scott Lewis (Gameplay Programmer), Ed Beach (Lead Gameplay Programmer), et Brian Wade (Lead Programmer), pour nous parler de l'I.A. de Civilization V.

Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to the eighth episode of the Civilization V podcast series. I’m Elizabeth Tobey, and today I’m talking with Scott Lewis, Gameplay Programmer, Ed Beach, Lead Gameplay Programmer, and Brian Wade, Lead Programmer, about the AI in Civilization V – or, as I like to say, explain why Gandhi can be so evil when all you want is for him to accept your research agreement and give you some iron. To start, Ed gives a broad overview of how the team approached each civilization’s personality and play style.

Ed Beach: Let me first start by explaining what we have that makes each Civilization play a little bit uniquely. We have what we call our flavor system. And so before any game starts up we have defined for every Civilization whether they're particularly interested in offensive military action or defensive military action. Whether they like to pursue things maybe with fast mounted units or maybe they like to build naval units and explore around the seas. So a good example of a nation that we would give a high flavor for navies would be England just because they built their empire that way and so we want to reflect that in the game. We also have flavors that define whether they like to keep their people happy, whether they like to investigate science, a lot of economic sides to the game as well are all defined with our flavor system. So for each of the different leaders and civilizations in the game we have those settings then at the beginning of the game we go and tweak them all a little bit so that nobody plays exactly the same in two games and some games you might have France particularly interested in building navies or in another game you might have a civilization that's normally interested in keeping their people happy a little bit less inclined to that and they may be a little bit more militaristic. So once we have that all established then we start to use that to drive the AI's behavior in the different games so you'll have situations where that controls both how they expand, whether they want to build more cities, whether they want to expand by conquest, it will also drive what kind of units and buildings they put into their city and also just how they relate to the players. Are they gonna take a friendly route because they're gonna go for a cultural victory this time? Or are they really trying to dominate the world militarily and they're not actually very good neighbors for you to have right on your border.

Brian Wade: Yeah but even with the bias – even with the variation, Napoleon will generally be a very aggressive neighbor.

Scott Lewis: Yeah it's not good to have Montezuma on your border either.

BW: No, you probably ought to think about defenses in any case.

EB: Yeah so you'll see the basic tendencies of them once you've played the game enough times and have a rough idea what to expect but they're not gonna play it the same way every time. And then also we'll look at the situation on the map where they start. If you have a civilization that likes to build up their navy but they happen to start inland, you know, eventually they'll get to the coast and start working on their navy but they'll adjust to that situation and realize that “hey if there are a whole bunch of horses right near where I'm starting maybe I wanna go ahead and build a mounted army and start out my game that way.”

ET: Beyond the complexities of each civilization’s individual personality and gameplay style, there is another level to AI in Civilization V: Difficulty levels. When you get to the top tier of difficult, the AI can be brutal – I know that I’m not the only one who has accused the computer of cheating when on an expert level. Ed explains what the AI’s “thought process” is like on different difficulty levels, and how it gets “smarter” as you advance to more challenging settings.

EB: I think one thing the AI is going to do is – we have it set up so when the AI is trying to make a decision – so it's trying to decide what to build in the city, trying to decide what technology to pursue next – we go ahead and we look at all the possibilities based on where they are in the tech tree right now and we rank them according to which ones we think are the best choice for a strong Civ player at that given point in time. Now what happens is when you're playing on the higher difficulty levels we almost always pick one of those top choices just because we want that civilization to be as competitive as possible with you. When you're at a lower difficulty, one of the things that we do is we start opening that up to some of those other lower ranking choices and we pick from those choices as well. We're also looking at kind of a different depth of analysis in terms of the military and tactical game when you go and you have a higher difficulty setting. So rather than just looking in the immediate area of a city when you're playing on the higher difficulty levels the AI is gonna be thinking a little bit deeper, looking further across the map and using that to kind of come up with decisions like, “oh wow I'm actually 10 tiles away. Maybe I have 3 or 4 units that can reinforce the situation.” I'll pull those in and that will strengthen my military right in the nick of time here.

ET: So here’s the million dollar question – “what does this mean for me? How is it going to change my gameplay?” Moreover, how is it going to change the AI’s gameplay from past iterations of Civ?

EB: I think one thing we wanna do with Civ – not only just for the AI but also for the player – is we wanna set it up so that playing each of the Civs is a unique experience. So if you look at it, in other games we've had bonuses that allow you to do things a little bit faster as each of the different civilizations that were part of their leader traits. And then we've also had unique units, unique buildings, that kind of thing. We still have the unique units and the unique buildings but one thing that we added for each of the Civs is what we're calling its unique trait. And so each of the Civilizations play with one special bonus basically that they have – and most of the special bonuses help them throughout the game, both in the early game all the way through to the late. I don't know if you guys wanna talk about any particular Civs you have a fun time playing with their bonus.

BW: Well the Germans have a pretty good aggressive bonus and they can get the barbarians to help fill out their military forces. You can get a large barbarian horde and bring it into play quickly.

EB: And so one thing we wanna do is actually set it up so that the AI is aware of these bonuses and will take advantage of them. So the Germans for instance – Brian brought them up – their bonus is when they encounter barbarians they take out the barbarian camp. They can convert the barbarian camp guard into a German unit. But we have them very aggressive at scouting so that they will find all the barbarian camps early in the game so that will hopefully help the AI capitalize on their bonus. There are other good examples of that. For instance, India likes to build very large, populated cities. They don't need as many cities as the other civilizations, they just like to pack a lot of people into them and get lots of citizens to work those tiles. And the AI's aware of that and so with India it's gonna be less likely to build settles but it will be very likely to build buildings that help provide food and growth to those cities.

SL: My favorite ability is that when the Aztecs defeat a unit they get culture which is just sort of really weird and strange but kind of great because most of the time to get culture you have to build temples and churches and what not. And it's kind of weird, so I like it.

ET: This entire podcast, I’ve talked about AI as if it is this amorphous mass – a single “thing” of sorts that makes the computer players of Civilization V do what they do. That is, of course, a massive oversimplification of what is actually going on behind the scenes. There are AI subsystems that work together to make all of these choices and create a cohesive opponent that feels like a real player.

EB: One of the things we wanted to make sure of with the AI for Civ V is that it looked at the game from all of the different perspectives that a strong player of the game looks at the situations that you're faced with. And so there are a lot of different levels that we think the AI needs to operate on to be effective in playing the game. So there's some times where you're just looking at the overall situation and you're trying to figure out, “how am I gonna win?” Am I gonna pursue a cultural victory or a conquest victory or a spaceship victory? So we need an AI that's thinking at that level. We also need to think about your economy. Do I need more cities? Do I have enough cities? In the cities that I have, do I need to boost the buildings that I have to increase my science production? Or maybe I'm running low on happiness and my people are going to be limited by that. So we need like an economic AI. We also need AI thought in terms of how to get units to a destination. Maybe we wanna found a new city. Maybe we wanna bring a military force of 5 or 6 units somewhere to either defend against an enemy attack or launch an attack of our own. And then once those enemy units get there, how do they need to be deployed for battle? Who's in the front line? Who's in the back line? Do we try to set up flank attacks? Do we just sit back and let our ranged units whittle down the enemy? So all those different decision types are things that we want the AI concerned with and we decided the best way to structure the AI software for this project was to go ahead and create a subsystem at each of those levels. So we have a grand strategy subsystem that tries to figure out how you're gonna win the game. We have an economic subsystem that acts as kind of your economic advisor and figures out oh I need more cities or I don't or I need more science or I don't. There's a military subsystem that worries about what types of units I need to produce. Whether I have enough defenses or whether I need to go and increase my defense budget and get more units built. And then there's also an operational AI that delivers units to a particular target. And once they get there there's a tactical AI. So we have all these different levels. There's also a diplomatic AI subsystem, there's AI subsystems that manage city production. And we've set it up so that those different subsystems know how to communicate with each other. If they have a special request that needs to go in so that – because I need to prepare for war I need the military subsystem to go and start producing a bunch of units, maybe fast moving units, maybe units with bombard capability, whatever. Those types of requests can get passed around between the subsystems so that they're coordinated and kind of are all operating on the same page.

ET: Like most core aspects of Civilization, the fifth iteration in the series has taken AI to a new height. The team is striving to achieve the most dynamic and distinctive opponents possible, and a challenging and unpredictable yet believable experience for players across all difficulties – from brand new to veteran player. And while knowing more about the technology that goes into making Gandhi such a sly opponent won’t help you get him to accept your research agreement, or give you that iron you so desperately need, at least now you know you have Ed, Scott, and Brian to thank for making him who he is.

Bot · « **Réponse #9 le:** 17 Sep 2010 à 09:30 »

Episode 9 : Que sont les cités-États ?

Elizabeth Tobey reçoit Pete Murray (Marketing Associate) et, Jon Shafer (Lead Designer) pour nous parler des cités-Etats.

Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to the ninth episode of the Civilization V podcast series. I’m Elizabeth Tobey, and today Pete Murray, Marketing Associate, and Jon Shafer, Lead Designer, join me to talk about a brand new element of Civilization V: City States.

PM: City-states are NPC civilizations that are never gonna get bigger than a single city, they're not out to win the game. And they're there to give the major civilizations a chance to develop allies who are not gonna be competitors in trying to win. They're there so you can develop some, you know, peaceful political interactions to gain some advantages for your civilization. But they're there to make things happen between the major civs. They really cause a lot of things to happen in the game. So you can become friends with a city-state, you can get some advantages for that, but you have to decide, “am I gonna protect these if somebody else comes to take them over?” They can really make wars break out on this basis. If you're friends with somebody and your neighbor invades them and you go to liberate that city-state, you know, you're gonna run into conflict with a major civilization so it's exciting when you have these political interactions arise out of something as simple as a minor civilization in the game itself.

ET: Single cities marooned in a sea of growing, power-hungry civilizations don’t appear, at face value, to be much of a challenge. If they aren’t out to win the game, after all, they should be easy to ignore or conquer without much thought. So what makes City States so crucial to ultimate success? And why should anyone care whether they conquer instead of placating and protecting them?

PM: You can conquer a city-state and spare yourself having to build a settler but that'll have ramifications for your interaction with the other city-states in the game. They'll be more nervous about interacting with you if they see you've sacked one of their friends. You can liberate a city-state and, in which case, they're gonna love you very very much for a long time. But becoming friends with a city-state is good in the sense that it can give you advantages where you may not have a great deal of your own support. Say it's hard for you to find sources of food to feed your cities. A maritime city-state may give you a bonus to your food. A militaristic city-state may grant you military units from time to time if you're finding you're having difficulty with production. So if you're doing well in an aspect that can really, you know, put you into overdrive on that.

ET: For those of you who are still thinking “that doesn’t sound like much of an obstacle for my master plans” let me tell you that City States are elusive and sneaky. I speak from personal experience when I say this – they are definitely able to mess with your entire strategy.

JS: There are a few different things that make city-states really interesting and unique in the game. First off, they can actually provide you bonuses that you can't get in other ways. So for example, if you're able to befriend them, they will gift you they're strategic and luxury resources. So that's something that you could get by conquering them but there are ramifications for fighting wars. Other players become more wary of you. If another major power is protecting that city-state then that will bring a new conflict. But if you're able to become allies with that city-state then they will give you things. Additionally they're also a source of competition both in terms of the military game and also the overall diplomatic game. There's only one player that can receive the resources from a particular city-state and you can only have one ally of a city-state at a time, so there's gonna be competition for that role. If two players are competing over one city-state only one of them will be the ally of that city-state. Obviously there's also the war angle. If somebody tries to conquer a city-state that you're friends with or you try to conquer a city-state somebody else is friends with that will have diplomatic repercussions and the major power might come up and tell you, “hey we don't like what you're doing,” or they might just outright go to war and try to take the city back and liberate them. So there's a number of different angles that city-states provide that are unique and really interesting we think.

ET: As I said before – City States are not something to dismiss without careful consideration. Let me explain a little bit about what City States have done to me over the past few months: They have told me to do things (like wage war on Montezuma or another City State, like Geneva) and then attacked me based on the outcome of me trying to do them a favor. Agreeing to help them all won’t help you, either – too much aggression or deception, and they all won’t trust you. Even choosing to attack the wrong people will end up causing a massive war. Not keeping a City State happy can cause you to lose their friendship and any bonuses and perks they are giving you will disappear, possibly throwing your civilization into upheaval, leaving you weak and exposed to attack. And, on occasion, City States will take over other civilization’s cities while defending themselves – and if you aren’t careful, those cities could be your own.

JS: They definitely can suck you into a conflict. This is one of the things that we've found is really interesting about this system and it's something that Dennis has told me about in some of his games in particular where a city-state that he was trying to be friends with but he wasn't investing a lot in. Suddenly it was attacked by another player and that really changed the nature of his game. He's normally a very peaceful player and he doesn't like going to war aggressively. But suddenly he had a very good reason to try and fight this other player. And he did, and he enjoyed it, and he thought it was really interesting. And that's something that you wouldn't have seen in previous Civ games because you very rarely had any reason to protect another player. It was all about killing them or just finding ways to defeat them. So if they were losing then that was a good thing for you, this is something that's new. They can also, depending on their personality, they can get involved with players in other ways. So one example is that particularly hostile or militaristic city-states can actually request that you go and kill another neighboring city-state. So by doing that you gain a lot of friendship with the city-state that made that request but obviously that's an act of war so everybody else is gonna not like that as much, especially the city-state you went after and any players that are protecting that city-state. So there's a number of different interactions that are there can bring about interesting situations.

PM: Maybe the coolest part is that these interactions arise out of situations specific to the game they're in. There's nothing contrived about this. There's nothing that happens in the game where we say when we're making the game, you know, “pre-load this staged scene involving these city-states.” I mean these requests that the city-states make, these resources that they can provide you really do arise out of the very specific layout of the continent, their, you know, relationship to their neighbors who settled near them. And so it emerges out of the game play and you get this depth, this unexpected depth and complexity just out of game play in the course of Civ V and that's one of the things that feels the coolest about the city-states.

ET: Last episode, I think you got the picture that Gandhi and I aren’t always on the best of terms. Second to him, I think City States are my main nemeses in Civilization V. When I started playing, I thought that they were great – pockets of awesomesness in a game full of deceipt and double crossers. But don’t be fooled – City States are just as wily as full-fledged civilizations. They’ll burn you if you aren’t careful – and quite possibly, even if you are.

Bot · « **Réponse #10 le:** 18 Sep 2010 à 11:19 »

Episode 10 : Les doctrines sociales

Elizabeth Tobey reçoit Jon Shafer (Lead Designer) pour nous parler des doctrines sociales.

Elizabeth Tobey: In the tenth episode of the Civilization V podcast series, Jon Shafer, Lead Designer, talks with me about the social policy system – a new feature for the series. And while social policies may sound strange and different, for veteran Civ players, they will probably become very clear and intuitive by the end of my chat.

Jon Shafer: The social policy system is one of the new things that we're doing with Civilization V. It kind of fills the role of the governments and the cultural system in a way of the past games. So we like the civics system from Civ IV but there were a few things that we wanted to change with it and the policies kind of grew out of that in a way, and also there is some inspiration from other games like Company of Heroes and World of Warcraft. They have systems where you build up points as the game goes on and you can buy different things. So that's kind of the general theme behind the policies tree. It's also encompassing the religion element for Civilization V. So we don't have specific religions in Civ V anymore but we do have part of the policies tree which is dedicated to that part of the game.

ET: Many people have really loved various governmental, religious, and cultural systems in past Civ games. Social policies aren’t about subtracting, really, but about restructuring and creating something new, and streamlined, that worked with the flow and gameplay of Civilization V.

JS: Well the biggest thing is we wanted there to be a sense of forward momentum with the tree. There's always something new that you can get and it's always gonna be a good thing. One of the elements of the Civ IV civic system was a lot of times you would unlock a new civic that wasn't gonna be very useful for your style of play. A lot of times we'd actually see people that would just always switch civics whether or not it mattered or if it was a good thing for them or they would never switch civics because they didn't quite understand what was going on. So the main theme for the policies is we always wanted there to be something good that you get. So it's always a choice of getting something new instead of having to backtrack and go over and “is this combination gonna be better than this combination” - you always want to just get new things. So that's the main reason why we changed the structure. In terms of simplification, it's actually – there's quite a few more policies in Civ V than there were civics in Civ IV so there's actually more depth there in a manner of speaking.

ET: And that is definitely true – there are a lot of policies to choose from. All told, there are 8 different policies to choose from – some that work well together, and others that absolutely do not – and as someone who has been trying to find the best combination for my personal strategy, I can tell you there is a lot to work with, and the impact of building on certain policies definitely can be felt as the game progresses.

JS: We wanted there to be the choice of what, which large branches to go down and which individual policies you wanted to adopt. But um, there's still – there's a lot going on in there. It's not simplified.

ET: For me, one thing that ties closely to social policies is a civilization’s happiness. While social policies do a lot more than help keep people happy, they can be a very important component to the overall health of your empire and thusly, the strength and growth potential of your cities. Happiness is a completely retooled concept, as well, and another element of the game that looks deceptively simple at face value, but is quite the challenge to master.

JS: Yeah that's one of the changes that we've made with the game. Happiness is now something that is empire based, it's not city based anymore. The thinking behind that, as we've talked about, is the fact that we wanted to give players different options for how they develop their civilization. In previous games there was kind of a best path to kind of travel down. So you wanted a civilization that had a certain number of cities at any point. But in Civilization V, happiness being a global limiter means that you can have a civilization with a few really big cities or a lot of small cities or anywhere in between, so it gives a lot of flexibility for the players.

JS: Happiness is meant to represent the stability of your civilization as a whole. How much your people like you, how much they dislike you. And it's an abstraction to contain a lot of different things. So, again, instead of specific cities it kind of measures your civilization as a whole. The main thinking behind that was allowing players to play different ways but there's a number of things that feed into that. Like previous Civilization games, the size of your cities is a pretty important part of that. There's also a factor for capturing cities. So if you capture a lot of cities you're going to have to deal with that more. And, you know, we're still working on calibrating the numbers and the balance on things so it can be a little challenging or a little easy at times even at some points. So we're still working on that, trying to get that tuned up correctly. In terms of gaining happiness there's a few different ways that you can actually acquire it. The easiest and most obvious is through the acquisition of luxury resources and this is usually what you'll do early on in the game especially. You'll have your capital city, which will be founded, and nearby you'll have probably some luxury resources which you can use to help to either improve the growth of that city or start expanding into other cities. There's also a number of buildings that will improve your happiness like the coliseum, and later in the game there's things like the stadium. Social policies play into that. There's quite a few that improve your happiness in different ways. So there's some that might increase your happiness for every city that has a garrison, that's kind of more of a militaristic route. Or there's some that might increase the amount you get from each luxury resource that you already have, and that's more of a commercial aspect to it. In general trading is going to be a big part of this. You want to trade with other major civilizations that have excess luxury resources because only one copy helps you. It's kind of like Civilization III where if you have, let's say, three different sources of silk. You can use one of them and the other two are good only for trading away so we really want to encourage that. And also by befriending city-states you can get their resources which is useful. So that's the part where I get cut off. The system is definitely on its way, and something that we're missing right now is a lot of that trading aspect which we're going to be working on here soon. So you don't – you'll see occasional trades but you don't see a lot, which is something we wanna kind of push a little bit more.

ET: So you're saying that the reason why my civ hates me isn't completely my fault?

JS: Not completely, no. That one is – it's gonna be really tricky to balance that one just because it does, you know, it is meant to cover so many different situations, you know. If you have 50 cities or if you have two enormous cities, you know, there's a lot of different inputs into that. If you have a lot of cities you'll have more resources but it's harder to build things. If you only have two cities then it's gonna be hard to get resources but it's not gonna be too hard to get the building. So getting all those numbers right has been a challenge and we're trying to bring them back in line. You can only do that by playing the game a lot and being like, “oh my god what's wrong here?” I change it like every few days trying to get it right.

ET: Jon had one last question to answer concerning happiness before I’d let him go: How do I make my city awesome?

JS: Um, ok there's a few things there. Like in previous games we have the concept of food producing new citizens so like the other games, the more food the better. So that causes your cities to grow. And then that of course works against the happiness limit. As the game goes on you definitely wanna be looking for new sources of happiness. If you're into expansion then looking for new luxury resource is a good way of doing that. And also if you're not then there's the trade component or there's some other directions you can go there. In terms of border growth, there's something new that we've added to the game that some people have noticed, and that's the fact that the borders don't grow in rings anymore, they grow one tile at a time. And that does a couple things. It paces the game a little bit better. Instead of having the borders just expand really big early on and then you have all you need for a long long time. When it's one by one, every time you get a new tile that's something that's significant and it's always something you can use because if there's let's say another resource nearby that you want to claim, then grabbing that and getting that in your city's range of being able to be worked is pretty important. Additionally it also makes the borders look more interesting. You have something that looks more like the real world as opposed to just large blobs all over the map. So that was something that we wanted to tack on a couple different ways. So those are a few things that will be useful in terms of growing and expanding and improving one's civilization.

ET: If you still have questions about social policies and happiness in Civilization V, never fear. We’ve taken a closer look at both issues – and gone through each policy tree in depth – on the Civilization V community site, so for more details, be sure to visit us at www.civilization5.com, and thanks for listening.

Bot · « **Réponse #11 le:** 18 Sep 2010 à 11:26 »

Episode 11 : La Civilopédia et l'arbre technologique

Elizabeth Tobey reçoit Jon Shafer (Lead Designer) et Brian Wade (Lead Programmer) pour nous parler de la Civilopédia et de l'arbre technologique.

Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to the eleventh episode of the Civilization V podcast series. I’m Elizabeth Tobey, and today I’m talking with Jon Shafer and Brian Wade at Firaxis to take a closer look at Civ V’s Civlopedia and Tech tree - two strategic tools you’ll need to have a successful campaign. As always, we start big – explaining what the Tech Tree and Civlopedia are, why they are important, and, of course, what Civilization V wanted to do with them.

Jon Shafer: My name is Jon Shafer, I'm the lead designer for Civ V. The tech tree, in many ways, is the backbone for every Civilization game. It covers the span of history and includes basic things like mining and writing from the very beginnings of history and goes forward into all parts of what we know, into the near future. So it serves as a place for positioning units and buildings and all sorts of other things that are objects in the game that you can manipulate or powers or whatever else, and it serves as a way to pace the game. Early on you don't have future tech so you can't do certain things that future tech lets you do. So it's necessary to progress through the technology tree in order to gain new things.

Brian Wade: Hi, I'm Brian Wade, lead programmer. Well Civilopedia is really the best source of documentation for the game. It pretty much has the up to date rules and values of everything because it's pulling the data straight from the same places that the game itself is pulling it. So if it says that a unit is strength 75, well it's strength 75. Manuals - printed manuals and such – get out of date very quickly with changes and the Civilopedia doesn't. It also has lots of tidbits – and have to give a shout outs to Paul and Michelle for writing lots of background history on all the various things that ended up in there.

ET: I know I’m not alone when I say the Tech Tree has been a veritable lifesaver in many a Civ game. Particularly when playing on a higher difficulty level, focusing how you research technology can be the most crucial element for successfully completing your victory conditions. Over the years, the Tech Tree has grown, and morphed, and for Civilization V the Tech Tree again has changed to fit the goals of the development team and work in harmony with gameplay.

JS: The main thing with the tech tree that we wanted to do was allow players to look at it and immediately have some idea of where they were going and what they were doing. This is something that was definitely a challenge in Civ IV. Even I had trouble figuring out how to get from one place to another and a lot of that was due to just how things were laid out and how they were connected together. So one of our goals early on was to try and make sure you could open it up and plot out your course in your head without relying on the computer to pick things for you. Something else that we wanted to do was to make it so not only could you see what you were doing but also have different, fairly obvious, paths through the game. So in terms of the tech tree that we have in Civ V, the top branch is kind of the naval branch of the game. The bottom branch is kind of the military branch of the game. And there's some economic ones in the middle. It's not that clear cut but that's an example of how we tried to lay it out such that you have an idea of where you're going and you can see it as well.

ET: As with most important elements of a game, the Tech Tree was created over time and endured many changes as it went from a concept in the devs’ minds to a final, working element of the game. And while some may think that charting technologies is a relatively simple task, considering everything that goes in to making a game, building and finalizing the Tech Tree was a labor of love and iteration.

JS: The big thing with the tech tree is that it just changes a lot over time. The design of it has evolved quite a bit from where we started and this is actually something that's kind of different compared to Civ IV where Soren had a fairly good idea of what he wanted from the tech tree – at least how things were laid out and how they were connected – and then mainly moved items around within them whereas the tech tree for Civ V actually changed a number of times. One of the things that actually we did was it used to be thinner so there were fewer techs in a single column but I redesigned the tech tree and we had to redo the interface for it to allow everything to fit which did not make a couple people too happy, including Brian here who had to hook it up. But it was for the best, he will agree.

BW: Yeah, you have more choices at any given moment which was an important change from previous.

JS: Yeah, and the tech tree is definitely very challenging because you do have a lot of different things that are almost fighting one another. You want to – obviously we talked earlier about having it pace the game so you can't have techs that unlock things too early. So you can't have techs that give let's say tanks in the modern age. Of course it wouldn't make sense but also, as an example, you want to have certain things appear before others from a gameplay sense. As I alluded to as well, you need to have it work from a historical perspective. You can't have tanks in the medieval era, that just doesn't work. So even if the game, let's say, would be better gameplay-wise because you had tanks in the medieval era, you couldn't do that. So you have those two that are in some ways very much fighting with one another so you have that to consider in addition to just getting everything on there. “What belongs in there if we have this? Does that make sense? Are we missing anything?” So a lot of different things to consider.

ET: Now – down to strategy. Looking at the Tech Tree, and knowing Civ’s technologies, is important – but you aren’t going to win every time unless you have a solid strategy and tips and tricks at your disposal to exploit every bonus you can.

JS: The idea of the different branches having different themes definitely plays out there. At the very end of the tech tree you have the lower branch – kind of the military branch – and it leads to some of the more advanced military technologies. The biggest example of that is advanced ballistics which provides the nuclear missile which is fairly important for military. On the top part of the tech tree there's the more cultural and economic stuff that leads you to the diplo and cultural victories and the space race is kind of in the middle there in between things like rocketry which gives you certain units but also lets you build certain spaceship parts. So kind of all mixed together there at the end. So having an idea of what victory you're going for is pretty important so you can decide which path you're following to win the game. So that's something definitely to keep an eye on. In terms of other things, just mainly targeting what your needs are at that moment. So if you're, let's say, running low on gold you want to go for currency in the early game so you can build markets. If you're running low on happiness you go for whatever will address your needs at that time. If you're going military there are certain techs that will help you there of course. So just having an idea of what you need at that time and what to go for to resolve that.

ET: Switching gears, we now turned our focus to the Civilopedia – which is just as big as any past Civilopedia. In fact, the Civilopedia is now so big, one of the things Jon wanted to concentrate on was how to make all the information within it accessible to the gaming community. It’s fun to lose yourself in all of the articles, but if you need to find something quickly and get back to conquering the world, then the Civilopedia, with its plethora of information, had to be straightforward and easy to use in order to be successful.

JS: There's a couple things that I really wanted from the Civilopedia in this version of the game. The first was to make it fairly readable I guess. The Civilopedia does have a lot of information on it so trying to make sure that you can get to the important parts and things that will help you learn what's going on is pretty important. One example of that is just how we laid out the text. On the units page, for example, we tried to have what this unit is – very basic information – very prominently positioned so it's easy to identify those sorts of things. What I really wanted to have was a search because it's just really useful. You pop in, you're like, “what's the warrior do?” You just punch in “warrior” and it takes you to the warrior page and you can quit out of it easily. So we wanted to make sure that that was something we had.

BW: There's a lot of historical pieces in there. Admittedly, I wouldn't use the Civilopedia as an encyclopedia and use it to write reports for college or anything but Paul, who is the main writer for that, usually tried to come up with more entertaining pieces of history around characters and countries and little-known facts besides the stuff that everyone would normally associate with them. And it was more to give a little more light hearted view of some of history.

ET: That concludes the eleventh episode of the Civilization V podcast series. Thank you for listening – we’ll be back soon with the twelfth episode to detail the helpful people you might interact with over the course of a game.

Bot · « **Réponse #12 le:** 18 Sep 2010 à 11:38 »

Episode 12 : Les personnages qui nous aiderons...

Elizabeth Tobey reçoit Scott Lewis (Gameplay Programmer) et Jon Shafer (Lead Designer) pour nous parler des personnages à même de nous aider à conquérir le monde.

Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to the twelfth episode of the Civilization V Podcast Series. I’m Elizabeth Tobey, and today I talk with Scott Lewis and Jon Shafer about people you’ll meet over the course of the game and who will, potentially, be able to help you conquer the world. I start with perhaps the most important people to help you on your quest – your advisors. Advisors have appeared in Civ games throughout the years in varying capacities, and for the fifth iteration of the series, the team had a very clear picture of what they should do.

Scott Lewis: My name is Scott Lewis and I guess my title is gameplay programmer and sort of designer person and I made a lot of the design advisors. John really had a clear vision at the beginning of the game to have these advisors direct the player through the game and to help them play through the game and there’s 4 different advisors sort of directing you through the 4 different directory types. There’s a military advisor, economic advisor, foreign advisor, and science advisor. What we really wanted is somebody that was on the player’s side that’s sort of helping them out and giving them good advice. And they play sort of two roles in the game. One is to sort of introduce the player into the game and be like, “hey this is what’s going on. This is what this means, this is what that means.” We also have - when you build a unit or choose an attack – will say, “this is what this advisor wants.” It’s not just saying, “this is what’s best for the game” you say, “this is what’s best for you militarily,” or, “this is what’s best for your economy,” or, “this is best for diplomacy.” And also we have what I call the advisor council screen where the advisors will sort of look at what’s going on and give you feedback on what they think about the situation. I really wanted the player to feel like they had friends in the game – people that were on their side. A lot of times in these type of games you feel kind of isolated where it’s like you have a whole bunch of people trying to kill you and who’s on your side helping you out? And I saw it as the advisors.

ET: Advisors are not all the same – depending on how you play the game, and more importantly, who you play as, their wisdom will be different. And they have insights that go far beyond the obvious – they are not mere tutorials and do more than hold your hand – they know the secrets of each Civ that will be useful for your ultimate goal of winning.

SL: We do take in account each culture – like each civilization has their unique units and unique buildings and the advisors will be like, “hey you need to research horseback riding because you get these companion cavalry.” And they'll know where the good stuff is, and they'll know, through our awesome flavor AI system, like what's sort of what's good for you, and they'll talk about it and be like, “if you research this, you'll get access to that.” So they do have awareness of the unique abilities of each civilization so that's really cool.

ET: Regardless of how interesting or knowledgeable Civilization V advisors may be, some of you may not want to hear what they have to say all the time – or, as you play the game over time, you may want to hear only parts of their advice. After all, you are the ruler – you should be able to control what your helpers have to say, and when.

SL: Yes you can control how much they talk, or actually they interrupt you. Initially, for the tutorial, we wanted as much hands-off as possible because one of the strengths of Civ is that it starts very simple and sort of snowballs into a larger game and aspects of the game are introduced. We try to make it at a really elegant pace but still people may have problems with understanding things so we have the advisors come up at certain times. Some people are like, “I already know how to move units, I already found a city, leave me alone.” Beginning players are going to need that information whereas experienced players, you can go in the options panel and say, “I know how to play Civ, leave me alone.” You can say, “tell me only the new stuff” and they'll only talk about how ranged combat works, how 1 unit per tile works, and like sort of new systems to the game works. So the people who know how to play Civ - know about cities and know about workers – aren't going to be nagged to death. But that information is still very useful to new players. It's a hard line to walk and please when you play at home use that options dropdown to set it to your experience level because it helps.

ET: Advisors clearly explained, Scott and I now divert to a slightly different topic: Happiness. We’ve talked about happiness in Civ V before, and while happiness is not “a person that can help you win Civ V” by any means, there is a reason I’m asking about it. Just stick with me for a minute.

Jon Shafer: Happiness in Civ V serves a similar role to what it did in previous Civ games where it's kind of a limiter on the player's growth in their cities but it also serves as now a limiter on their expansion as well. We kinda wanted to roll those both into one number I guess. In previous games there were various ways of controlling expansion from corruption in the earlier games to maintenance in Civ IV and we wanted to do something a little bit different where it wasn't so cut and dry how much you could expand before you kind of ground down. So happiness allows you to grow your cities either really big or really wide, but not both at the same time very well. You have to increase your happiness of your empire to allow you to continue to expand or to continue to grow. So keeping that balance is important. You have a few different ways of increasing your happiness from hooking up resources which are on the land so that's kind of a way to gain more happiness by expansion. Or you have certain social policies that you can adopt that will increase your happiness – that's kind of a cultural way of increasing it. Or there are certain buildings that you can construct that will improve it and that's kind of a growth way. If you have really big cities that can build stuff quick you can go that route. So there's different ways of getting more happiness but you kind of have to balance that against everything else that you're doing in the game.

ET: Jon’s overview of happiness brings me back to “people who will help you in Civ V” – the citizens of your empire. They are people, and they do help you win – but to make sure they help you to the fullest extent possible, you have to keep them happy. More than that, you have to utilize them well so they are effectively achieving your goals. And, you have to know about Specialists.

JS: Specialists are something that's not really new to Civ V by any stretch. They were in previous Civ games. And we wanted to keep the great people as kind of they were in Civ IV where they have different roles and had different things that they could do. So that's a system that we've kinda carried from Civ IV, we have made some changes to it though. With regards to specialists, instead of just having a general plus or minus you can add them, remove them, whatever, and the number you can add is based on a lot of different factors – the way we've set it up is that buildings now have different numbers of slots for specialists. So, for example, the temple might have 1 or 2 slots for a particular specialist and once you do have a specialist assigned they work very similar to how they worked in Civ IV where they increase culture or science or production or whatever, and they also contribute Great People points to the pool. Unlike Civ IV, there are now individual pools for each type of great person so instead of there being a random roll when the big pool fills up and says, “well you got 50% science, you got 1% culture, and 49% production, here's your Great artist.” The Great Person created is now based on filling up that particular Great Person pool in that city so it gives the player a little bit more control over exactly how he wants to develop in that part of the game. Similar to Civ IV as well, the wonders all contribute so you can kind of mix and match those with the specialists to produce Great People in different ways. Each one has three different abilities I guess you could say. One of them is just some special power that's unique to that type of Great Person. So, for example, the Great Scientist can research a free tech. He's now the only one that can do that in Civ V whereas in Civ IV any of them could research a tech of a different type and now only the Great Scientists can research techs. They can all also build a special tile improvement on the map. So the Great Artist, for example, can build a landmark which gives culture to the city that works that tile. Or the Great General can construct a citadel which will give it a really big defense bonus and also damage enemy units that are stationed next to it so it's kind of an offensive and a defensive benefit. And they can all also start a golden age. It only takes one Great Person to start a golden age now – it's different from Civ IV – but the number of turns that they last goes down with each one you use so you kind of have to plan ahead when you're gonna use different types at different moments instead of just needing to get more and more. There's a little more strategy in terms of how you use them for that. Scott wants to talk about the Great Artist's special ability.

SL: Well do you want to talk about the other special abilities? Because I think they're really cool.

JS: Nah we'll let people wait – they'll find out.

SL: Ok. Great Artist is super evil – I totally love it. Because what he can do is you move him slowly up – well you don't have to move him slowly but I like to – move him slowly up to your borders where you share borders with another Civ and you can – is it just called culture bomb? - like you press the culture bomb button and what you do is you take their plots, and you take them for yourself and they really can't get them back without conquering your city. And that's probably gonna cause a war that'll destroy everybody but it's really fun to do. It's so evil. I mean there's nothing worse than taking somebody's land really I think. What I also like is it's not like, “ok maybe your borders will push somebody back, maybe not.” You're just gonna get the tiles, no questions asked. I mean you won't get cities obviously but it's really mean because if you take someone's uranium or oil that's just hateful and that's why it's fun.

JS: Scott, poor Scott. Whenever we play multiplayer all he does is produce Great Artists. It worked the first game but it hasn't been so successful since.

SL: Oh well.

ET: Before I let Jon and Scott head back into the dev studio, I asked them to impart any final knowledge they had for those listening to the podcast – nuances of the game that could help people get ahead.

JS: Well in terms of just general economic progression – I touched on it a little bit with the happiness about having good balance – that's kind of important across the game as well. The two factors that kind of are intertwined in a sense are happiness, which we talked about, and gold. We've talked in the past about how gold is more important in Civ V and that plays a big role because you have to manage your expenses in addition to where you're getting your money from and how you want to spend it. So there's a number of things you can do to spend money from purchasing items, buildings, and units to befriending city-states to buying land – whatever. But if you have too many expenses then you're not gonna be able to do those cool things and one of the big tradeoffs in the game is in order to produce more happiness there are a number of buildings that can do that like the coliseum but they tend to be pretty expensive. So if you're gonna play the game a certain way and let's say you run into happiness problems. Well you can construct coliseums but it's gonna cost you money. And now you're out of money, so you have to get money. So it's something that kind of goes back and forth and you have to keep a close eye on how both of those are going so it's a challenge to keep both of them in good shape at the same time. It makes it fun particularly in the mid to late game.

SL: Also, watch out for the Iroquois. Know when you're playing against the Iroquois and be very careful when you attack them because they can move very fast. Sometimes you go, “ok this guy's ticking me off, I'm gonna declare war on them.” Check before you declare war, make sure it's high (inaudible) out there and make sure you really wanna do that because they can be pretty vengeful. I like them a lot.

JS: Scott's all about vengeance and meanness. Why can't you just be happy?

SL: Well no I mean it's really – I love the Iroquois power which is being able to move through jungles and trees in your territory as if it's a road. And it disallows your military units just to fly from one side to the other. And, you know, if you declare war on them, march your little army in, you'll get every single defensive unit right next to you almost immediately. And it's terrifying. But when you're playing Iroquois it's like, “bring it.” It's like, “I got (inaudible) I can run everybody right over.” I love the Iroquois – just be aware of who you're playing against.

ET: And so ends the twelfth episode of the Civilization V podcast series. As always, we’ve barely scratched the surface of these topics (it seems whenever we get into strategy, not enough can ever be said.) Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with episode thirteen.

Bot · « **Réponse #13 le:** 11 Oct 2010 à 23:21 »

Episode 13 : Les merveilles.

Elizabeth Tobey reçoit Jon Shafer (Lead Designer) qui nous parle de l'importance des merveilles dans le jeu.

Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to the Civilization V Podcast Series. In our thirteenth episode Jon Shafer and I discuss the wonderful world of wonders in Civ V. As usual, we start with the big questions: What are Wonders in this game? And why should anyone care about them?

Jon Shafer: Well the wonders are meant to represent the great wonders of the world that have been constructed since the beginning of time – or at least the beginning of the game – and they include a lot of things that you would expect like the great pyramids, or the Taj Mahal – those sorts of things. And also some more obscure ones that aren't as well known at least in the West. So we try to get a good range across all of time and all of the world. The wonders themselves – for anybody familiar with Civ, they will know this – but for those who aren't, wonders are kind of like buildings that you can construct in your cities that are real expensive, they take a while to build, but they have really strong powers for you. So instead of just giving you something that helps the city in a small way, it might help the city in a really big way or help the empire or spawn a Great Person or something cool like that. So they're just kind of neat things that players can construct and since there's only one of them in the game, as soon as somebody builds a wonder that one's gone. So only one, ever.

ET: Wonders have always been in Civ, but the Wonders available have varied not only in structure, but also in their bonuses. For a Civ player hell bent on winning, Wonders are not merely technical and cultural marvels – they are tools to an ultimate goal, and thusly, these bonuses are of the utmost importance. What Wonders the team decided to include, and how they balanced the bonuses, shapes a major part of Civilization V’s gameplay.

JS: Well like I said we want to get a good range across everything. So a lot of different flavor from different parts of the world. A wonder that's in Civ V that wasn't in Civ IV, for example, is the Himeji Castle which is new. It was in Civ Rev but not in PC Civ games. And we also wanted to think about what sorts of different wonders could provide interesting bonuses. In terms of the bonuses themselves there's a lot of different things that we consider. One thing is we just brainstorm and think about, “ok what would we need to have for a wonder ability?” And something like the Great Person system lends itself all to that. You build this wonder and it gives you a Great General. You build this wonder and it gives you a Great Scientist. Those sorts of things. So you try to draw upon the systems that are in the game and use those to make interesting powers for things that can be built and it can give you something really neat. Additionally we also have wonders that you just kind of have to have. Things like the pyramids, things like the colossus, things like the great lighthouse. We wanted to find abilities for those that made sense. So, for example, the traditional one for the colossus has always kind of been to increase commerce or gold in that city and that's kind of something that we've brought forward from previous versions of the game as well so that's kind of how the colossus works in Civ V. Another good example is the Great Wall. It looks cool on the map so we have it. It's been in previous games, it's a really neat part of history that we want to have in the game. And in terms of the ability, this one is pretty cool. It means that every unit that's an enemy of yours that moves through your territory has to spend double movement to do so. So it's a very powerful defensive wonder. Especially if you have a large empire and something's trying make their way through it, it can make things very challenging. It's always interesting when one of the AI players builds it and you think about it and you're like, “man I was going to attack that guy, ugh this is gonna suck.” We consider a lot of different things from history to “has been in Civ before” to what works well with what we have in the game now.

ET: Jon pointed out something that is key when dealing with Wonders: Each Wonder has the potential to drastically change the way not only you play, but how your opponents play against you. The Great Wall is a fantastic example of that, but there are, of course, others.

JS: Well we tried to make sure that the different wonders had different themes to them. And this is especially true in the late part of the game when you're thinking more about victory and you don't want just some random ability that won't help you on the way to winning the game. So especially in the late game we wanted to make sure that all the wonders kind of related to specific victory types. So one example is the Brandenburg Gate which is new. What that does is when you finish it it gives you Great General which can be very useful militarily, obviously. You can take that to the front lines and it will boost the strength of your units which is very helpful if you're trying to win a conquest victory. So that's just one example of how we tried to fit a wonder to a specific path in the game and make sure that it made sense for what players would actually be doing.

ET: In Civilization V, Wonders are not only of the man made variety. The team created a new, and quite different, variation on Wonders – Natural Wonders. Now, exploring the land and sea has a very real purpose beyond scouting for enemies and a good location for your next city.

JS: So the original idea of the natural wonders actually came out of something that we were playing around with for victory. We originally had a few different things that you could do to contribute victory points to your total and there are different competitions throughout the game. One of the themes for them was exploration. So we wanted to have players have to go and find something in the world in order to compete with other players and kind of win in this manner. The natural wonders kind of came out of that. They're also inspired somewhat by the relics in Civ Rev where you have these things that are really cool and powerful out in the world and you go and find them and you get some cool bonus out of that. So they're kind of like the Tribal villages or what they are in Civ V now is called ancient ruins – known to the community as “goodie huts.” It's also what they're called in the code. We had to come up with some name that made sense. “Goodie huts” just don't have much flavor to them. So they're kind of upgraded versions of the goodie huts in some way. So you find a natural wonder and what it actually does for you is it boosts your happiness which can be very important. It contributes a certain amount to how much happiness you have in the empire which can keep you expanding or growing or whatever. And that can be particularly important as the game progresses and it becomes a little more difficult to find sources of happiness. So constructing caravels or whatever to go out and explore the world can be pretty useful in that manner. In addition to just finding other players and trading and that sort of thing, finding the natural wonders is another element of the game that's pretty cool that we brought to the exploration side of things.

ET: As with everything, Jon has some personal favorites (and so do others on the dev team) when it comes to Wonders. Personally, for me, the Hanging Gardens have always been a favorite (mostly because I think they look awesome.)

JS: One that is pretty neat that we're constantly fighting over in multiplayer is Stonehenge. Stonehenge, what it does is it gives a huge boost in culture. A lot of the early game culture buildings only give you, let's say 2 culture per turn. But Stonehenge will give you 8, which is really quite a bit. So what that will do is the borders of wherever you build it – typically your capital because you're trying to get it early and you don't have other cities – it will expand the borders of the capital very quickly so you get lots of resources and different things. It will also speed up your social policies quite a bit in the early part of the game. So it's a neat one that is worth grabbing especially if there are other humans in the game because everybody wants it so grabbing it first is pretty fun. Other than that I talked about the Great Wall earlier of course which is pretty neat. I like to be on the offense, so it's not as useful to me, so I like to make sure I have it so no one else can. That makes things a little bit easier for me.

ET: And so ends podcast number thirteen for Civilization V. Hopefully, you have more insight not only into the new Wonders of the game, but also why the team chose them, and how you’ll be able to effectively exploit them to conquer the world. Thanks for joining us, and we’ll be back soon with Episode 14.

Bot · « **Réponse #14 le:** 11 Oct 2010 à 23:29 »

Episode 14 : Les victoires.

Elizabeth Tobey reçoit Jon Shafer (Lead Designer) qui nous parle des conditions de victoires du jeu.

Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to the fourteenth episode of the Civilization V Podcast Series. My name’s Elizabeth Tobey, and today, I’m back with Jon Shafer to discuss a very important aspect of Civilization: How you win. There are several different roads to victory in the game, and Jon has insight into not only what each are, but how best you should achieve them.

Jon Shafer: So the victories in Civ V are – at least in terms of what they are – is similar to the previous games. So we have a diplomatic victory, we have a science victory, we have a culture victory and we have a military victory. Those are the four. You can also win if you have the high score when the game runs out of turns but that's kind of sad and not very impressive. The four victories in Civ V, like I said, are similar to what was in IV but the mechanics for them are all different. I'll go ahead and start with the military victory. Players familiar with Civ Rev will recognize this. To win a military victory you have to be the last player standing that has their capital – their original capital. So if you're able to take out everybody's capital then you can win that way. You don't have to wipe everybody out completely. So this is officially the domination victory in Civ V. It can be pretty interesting because you obviously can just have a surgical strike that will take out somebody's capital and you can try to hold on to that against the rest of the empire or you can try and take them out slowly and just wipe them out completely and take their capital and it'll be much easier to hold it that way but it will take longer and you'll have to spend more resources to do it, etc. One of the reason why we took this route with conquest or domination victory was fighting wars in Civ V does take longer than it has in previous games. You don't have the big stacks and just move them around 1 tile at a time until your big stack wipes out every unit they have and then you've killed them off. It does take a little bit more time and more planning to execute a war. We didn't want to have to force players to wipe out every single city, every single unit on the map to win for a military victory. So that kind of plays into what we thought was interesting in Civ Rev and also kind of responding to what we have in Civ V and embracing that. The cultural victory is based on the policies tree. Instead of just needing to accumulate a certain number of culture - a certain amount of culture in cities – you now have to complete 5 out of the 10 branches in the social policies tree. So finishing even that much is obviously fairly impressive. You're not gonna finish the whole tree of course. Once you've finished five branches you can construct the Utopia Project which is kind of like a wonder and it takes a while to build and once you've finished it you win the game. The thing we wanted to do is kind of make all the victories have different phases to them so you can recognize when somebody is getting close to winning so it shouldn't sneak up on you. That's kind of how the Utopia Project works for the culture victory. You will find out once somebody's finished all five of their branches and then they start the Utopia Project and you have a certain period of time where you can do something about that. Generally, beat them up. Third victory is science victory or space victory. The way this one works is more similar to the victory type in Civ IV where you need to build different spaceship parts. The difference with it in Civ V is that the parts themselves are constructed as units which then have to be sent to the capital and added to the capital to be combined with the spaceship. So instead of just finishing a spaceship part anywhere and it kind of just goes off into the ether, you actually have to build this unit and send him across the map and protect him and make sure it arrives safely. So that adds a new dimension to the space victory. It's more of a spacial challenge as opposed to, you know, “do I get to the end of the tech tree – do I have enough production to build these things quicker than everybody else? Ok.” There's a little bit more to it than that. Finally the fourth victory we'll talk about is the diplomatic victory. This one is probably the most different in that instead of just having votes based on population of different players in the game every civilization has exactly one vote. Not just that, but the city-states all have 1 vote. So you could be the largest Civ in the entire game and you could dwarf everyone else but in terms of the diplomatic victory you cannot win by yourself. It's just not possible. Now what makes it really interesting is that players that have been killed can be liberated and if you liberate a player it will then vote for you in the United Nations election to win the game. You can actually win a diplomatic victory by kind of being a white knight where you go around and save everybody. You re-capture these conquered city-states and liberate them and then they'll vote for you. So you can kind of actually almost role play that and have a really interesting game that way. Like in Civ IV you have to build the United Nations and there's a vote that's held every so often and whoever has the U.N. gets an extra vote so there's kind of an incentive to actually be the one to build it instead of just waiting for somebody else to do it. That one is pretty interesting. It's very dependent on, in particular, becoming friends with a lot of city-states because in addition to liberation, if you're the ally of a city-state it will vote for you. So there's kind of a lot of machination that goes on in trying to steal allies away from other players and a lot of interesting things involved there.

ET: As one would imagine, each of these victory conditions will result in a fairly different play style. Going for a cultural victory will require a distinctly different strategy than a domination victory. Particularly on the upper difficulties, this is crucial to a winning strategy. Jon explains how victory conditions can change play style and gives a couple tips on how to get ahead.

JS: The diplomatic victory, for example, is very reliant upon city-states like I said. If all the city-states are wiped out of the game, I forget the exact math, but it could be theoretically impossible to win a diplomatic victory just because the other players are not going to vote for you. It's not like Civ IV where you could threaten them or whatever. They kind of play it more as a game where they say, “I'm not gonna vote for you because voting for you will win the game for you. I have no interest in that, I want to win.” So you kind of have to go out on your own and make sure that you can get there and win by allying or liberating enough city-states. That's something that will also hold together in multiplayer as well. The diplomatic victory previous games is pretty much useless with regards to multiplayer because nobody's going to vote for anybody else but themselves and it just kind of didn't exist. So that makes it more interesting in multiplayer. And also the cultural victory, similar to previous games, you have to play a certain way to win that. If you're not building things culturally, if you're not getting Great Artists – that sort of thing – it's going to be impossible to win that way. A big thing with the cultural victory is that you generally can't be a huge “expansionistic” empire because the cost of your social policies is based on the size of your empire. The bigger the empire, the harder it is to change. I guess Russia would be a good example of that. It took much longer for them to kind of get out of feudalistic type of running their country. If you build lots and lots and lots of cities, if you conquer lots and lots of cities, you're not going to be able to win culture either. So you kind of have to plan ahead and make sure that each decision you make with regards to expansion is important. Military is obvious. You know, you go beat people up. The space race is kind of, as it has been in previous games, the default “you played well, you have a strong economy, you managed to fight off your opponents and made it down to the wire” victory. Obviously it rewards strong science. If you're the first to get to the techs that let you build the parts then it'll make it easier to win but it's not as focused a victory type as the other ones are.

ET: It seems logical to think, if every victory takes a different play style, that things could get pretty dicey during the end game if you are unlucky enough to have to change which victory you are going for. I wanted to know if it was even possible (especially for a competitive player on an upper difficulty) to change victory goals mid-game and still conquer the world.

JS: Depends on the type of victory. Military – it could be more challenging if you aren't fighting early but it's definitely possible again because you only need the capitals. If you're opportunistic you can sneak in and win that way. Culture would be much more difficult. Like I said, if you do have a huge empire then you probably locked yourself out. If you're more of a medium or smaller sized empire it's theoretically possible but you kind of have to make sure that you're focusing on it from at least the mid-game. If it's, you know, 1800A.D. and you haven't started and built any temples you're probably in trouble. In the diplo – there's a fair amount of flexibility in the diplo one because, again, you can decide to liberate other players. The city-states, of course, you can befriend later in the game and take them away from other allied players. And also with the diplo, if you do liberate an AI player they will vote for you. So if somebody was killed off that way you can go and rescue them in that manner. So there's some of them that have more flexibility than others. We generally kind of wanted to allow for some movement but certain ones are more open to that than others.

ET: I’ve been talking a lot about victories, and the difficulty of achieving your goals, on higher levels – but, of course, Civ has many different difficulties, and the AI adapts depending on what level you are on. Regardless of difficulty, however, the AI always tries to stop you from winning – and, of course, win themselves.

JS: The AI will kind of try to guess as to what victory you're going for. It could be wrong. It probably will be wrong sometimes. Maybe once or twice ever. It tries to keep tabs on what you're doing and kind of which way you're trending. So if you do adopt a ton of social policies early they're going to probably say, “hmm, this guy's going for culture! What are we gonna do about that?” One thing that we wanted to make sure we didn't do is if an AI sees that you are getting closer to winning or that you are really strong, they're not all just going to gang up on you and start fighting you and try to kill you just because you're getting close to winning because that's something that we didn't feel was really a lot of fun. Some of the earlier Civ games have had that feature and it's not one of the more popular ones so we wanted to make sure we didn't have that. That being said, if you're going for a militaristic game and you're attacking a lot of players, you're conquering city-states – that is kind of where we take that away and then we say, “alright this guy is a threat not only to winning the game but killing me. I might want to do something about this.” And that's particularly true with the city-states where as you start attacking more and more of them they'll start to band together and fight you and if you take a city-state somebody's allied or friends with then they're much more likely to attack you and be angry with you, so you kind of have to manage how that goes. They do try to pay attention, they do adapt, but we try to be mindful making sure the game is fun and not exactly cutthroat. This is exactly like multiplayer. So we're trying to strike a balance there.

ET: Finally, I get into one last part of how one wins Civilization V – what Civilization you play as is key to a successful victory. Each Civ comes with distinct strengths and weaknesses that can be exploited to your benefit, and Jon highlights some of those very benefits.

JS: Yes! The Siamese and the Greeks are both kind of geared towards city-states in terms of their special bonus and certain other ones get bonuses in different areas. So, for example, France gets a culture bonus which is definitely going to be helpful in going for a culture victory. Other ones, depending on their units or their ability, are more militaristic. Each of them have unique strengths but we wanted to make sure that they all kind of had some leaning but not too strongly. So you can still win a culture victory if you don't play France but France will have a bit of a head start on that.

ET: To round out our Victory podcast, I ask Jon a personal question – what is his method of choice when aiming to win a game of Civilization V? How about his favorite strategy? What does the guru of Civilization V do when he wants to conquer the world?

JS: Honestly I find them all pretty interesting. The diplo one in particular is pretty fun just because it is quite a bit different from anything that's been in an earlier Civ game. You can draw parallels to each of the other ones to earlier games but the diplo one is pretty unique mainly because it is so dependent on the city-states and the city-states are a brand new feature. That one is pretty cool. It can change quite a bit in the late game as you're getting closer to the end and how you spend your money and who's spending money where can really shake things up. So that one's probably the one I think is most interesting just because it's the newest and the freshest. I do think they're all fun though. Recently, I won a science victory a couple days ago. I'm going for military now. I've won a few culture games recently, and diplo I've liked so it was one of the first ones I won. They're all interesting. Try my hand at conquest this time.

ET: Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Civilization V podcast series. I hope we have given you more than enough food for thought as you strategize your first victories when Civ comes out on September 21st – only days away. Stay tuned for our fifteenth and final episode, where we look back on Civilization V’s development.

Auteur Sujet: Les Podcast Officiels de Civilization V (Lu 5050 fois)

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Les Podcast Officiels de Civilization V

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Podcast 1 : Welcome to Civilization V

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Podcast 2 : The Art of Civilization V

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Podcast 3 : Characters in Civilization V

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Podcast 4 : A Believable World

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Podcast 5 : All About the Engine

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Podcast 6 : The User Interface

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Podcast 7 : Battles and Gameplay Galore

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Podcast 8 : In-Game AI

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Podcast 9 : What Are City-States?

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Podcast 10 : Social Policies in Civilization V

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Podcast 11 : The Civilopedia and Tech Tree

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Podcast 12 : People You’ll Meet

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Podcast 13 : The Wonderful World of Wonders

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Podcast 14 : Victories Galore

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