Les Podcast Officiels de Civilization V

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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 :

• Bienvenue à Civilization V
• Le graphisme de Civilization V
• Les personnages de Civilization V
• Une immersion sonore plus réaliste
• Un nouveau moteur pour le jeu, mais pourquoi ?
• L'interface utilisateur.
• Batailles et Combats.

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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.

 

ET: Welcome to the Civilization V Podcast Series. I’m Elizabeth Tobey, and over the next few months, I’ll be taking you inside the Firaxis studio, introducing you to the Civilization V development team, and weaving my way through the latest iteration of this addictive series.

Before we begin wading in to the actual game, however, there is a team that needs introducing.

JS:  My name is Jon Shafer. I was originally part of the mod community and the Civilization forum community way back when for Civ II and Civ III and from there I made the jump to developer and have been working on Civ IV and then the expansions and then Civ V.

DS:  Well being that this is Firaxis, we've obviously got a tremendous amount of Civilization veterans on the team that have been here since many versions past.  One of the new additions we have to this team for instance, Brian Wade, lead engineer, sitting at the table here with us – he actually has been a long time Civilization fan and long time employee of other game studios making strategy games and we've got quite a few members on the team that are doing stuff like that.

BW:  Yeah jumped ship a few years back to come here to work on Civ V and brought some people with me.

DS:  Well that's what's great about the team.  The team is made up of not just, you know, employees but there's a tremendous amount of fans in play here too that actually came to work here at the company just because they were a fan or they came from the fan community and they finally get to work on the game, and that's what makes Firaxis games particularly special.  And I don't mean for this to sound like marketing jargon but this is true because if you're working on the game and you love the game and you believe in the franchise as a whole you're just gonna have a better game than somebody who's just here to do the work.

BW:  Yeah passion makes a huge difference and anyone who's passionate about the job they're doing is going to do a better job at it.

DS:  Yeah.  We've got some other interesting characters on the team as well I mean we've got some like Brian Busotti, our lead modeler who's been working on Civilization games for a long long time.  Chris Hickman, our lead animator, he had to have some adjustment because he came from the film and television industry.  And he had to learn an entire new way to do things because now we're like, “no you can't do anything you want – you have to actually make it fit on the computer and have the computer run the animations.”  So he had a period of adjustment where you had to adjust to the whole gaming philosophy.  I'll let Dorian talk about that some more.

DN:  Yeah I'll definitely talk – before we start talking about the specifics on the staff it was fun.  As a group we decided to get – I share an office with Brian and Jon and it hasn't always been super easy, but it's been super efficient to solve problems.  Because if people have a question about what we're doing in the game, if the designer, the engineer and the artist aren't aware of it we know it's probably not an important part of the game.  And if it's an item that we need to solve we can problem solve almost instantaneously.  So I think that was a really fun way to start off and we've been able to keep it like that for a while.  And then in the art team we have a wide range of guys that are gonna see the first game that they've worked on hit the shelves, and we've had guys that have seen, you know, 5-10 titles come out in the past 10 years or so.  And I've been really thrilled to see that wide range of people get along and be excited about working together because a lot of times there's generation gaps on projects and it seems like the older guys have gotten the young guys excited about the scope of what they're working on and the young guys have brought that nice energy level to it.  For example our terrain artist, Steve Eggry, has done a fantastic job and he comes from a painting background and this is his first sort of industry gig and he's been doing a great job.  And we have Greg Cunningham who's been working a lot on implementing the units and he's worked on a lot of Civ titles in the past and he's still learning new things and getting animations (inaudible) better so seeing that spectrum has been really exciting.

ET: As a hardcore Civ fan since a young age (I remember playing the original Civ long past my bedtime many nights in a row) the journey to Civilization V has been a long and winding road for me, as undoubtedly it has been for many dedicated fans listening to this recording. But Civ V is so much more than merely “the game that comes after Civ IV” and its dev team has a distinct and unique background, making them perfect for breathing new life and taking Civilization to new, unexplored places. Jon Shafer, Lead Designer for Civilization V, starts from the beginning – when designing the title began.

JS:  The very beginning would probably be considered the summer of 2007.  That was right after Beyond the Sword was finished and some of us had peeled off from that and started on early prototype work for Civ V.  The first two people in the project were myself and Dorian and from that point we were starting to prototype some game concepts.  The first thing we tackled was combat and Dorian was exploring the visuals as well.

DN:  I spent a lot of time gathering research as to what would make a history game cool, looking a lot at film and classical paintings and we wanted to sort of re-imagine the scale that people were playing Civilization at, so we wanted to look at much larger battles and we did a lot of that by modifying the existing Civ IV game which was really fun.

ET: That’s Dorian Newcomb, the game’s Lead Artist, who also has quite the storied history with the franchise and has come from a background of many past Civilization games. But Civ V isn’t just for the hardcore addicts such as myself, or the modders-turned-lead-designers like Jon – Civ is the strategy game for PC, and is something everyone with a working computer should experience. But how to describe such an expansive experience that is Civ? I asked for an elevator pitch – perhaps ten or twelve floors, give or take a few.

JS:  I think the main thing with any Civilization game really is the opportunity to live through history and guide it as you would - however you would like.  So, you know, one example I've used in the past is people really like historical books or movies or maybe even other games.  Civilization allows you to cover the entire gamut of human history and the ability to shape it and do whatever you want with that.  You can be a warmonger, you can build great wonders of the world, you can be a diplomat, you can, you know, do whatever you want.  And it's an opportunity to, you know, be the guy or the girl in charge and, you know, live history.

DS:  That's what the best part of this game is, because often times you have games that really want you to play a certain way.  You know how you're gonna start and they know how they want you to finish, but Civilization as a series in general, you get to start somewhere and you really have no idea where you're gonna end up by the time it comes around.  We have no idea where players are gonna end up and I think that's what makes it so amazing.

BW:  It very much depends on choices they make and there's so many they can make throughout one game of Civ.

ET: Brian Wade, Lead Programmer on Civilization V, brings up an excellent point: Choice guides Civilization V in a way that few games can rival. This makes for a never-ending experience, and for game play that varies drastically depending on the player (or even the player’s mood.) Choice, however, is an established tenant of the Civ franchise, and the design principles for Civilization V both play off the importance of choice and go far beyond to focus on important aspects of the game that haven’t been brought to the front in the past.

JS:  The main design principles that we had going forward, there were a few big, big things.  One that will stand out to anybody who knows anything about Civ V already is the fact that we wanted to enhance and improve combat – add more depth there.  We wanted to mesh the idea of tactical combat with the whole grand strategic play of the game.  So you build the armies, you decide where they go, and then you actually have them fight.  So it covers the entire sequence of that part of history.  For me, one big things was also to give players a lot of flexibility in terms of how they develop their empires.  So happiness is a good example of that.  Happiness is now empire-based instead of city-based and what that lets players do is expand a lot and have a lot of small cities or a few really big cities.  Another example of that is gold.  We tried to make gold more important in the game, you can do a lot more things with it.  So that gives players the opportunity to do things that they haven't been able to do in previous games.  It gives them freedom.

ET: Civilization V’s Producer, Dennis Shirk, helps give me insight into what the team wanted to accomplish in this new game. Design principles aside, there were some big ideas they needed to master.

DS:  I think one of the things that I think Jon accomplished pretty well was to not make Civilization 4.5 or 4.7, but to do something completely new with the series – take it down a slightly different road without losing touch of the whole Civ series feel while still delivering something new to the player.

DN:  One goal that I wanted to have is we have a world that's very dynamic and every time you play the game it can be a very different experience.  I wanted to take an approach with the visuals for the terrain that made the landscape be very open, have a very epic feel, and have you have a sense of excitement about discovering new things.  That was hard to feel in the older square-based Civ IV title and the play was scaled a bit more so mountain ranges felt enormous and instead of a small bit of trees you felt like you're traveling through forested hills.  It was just the excitement of discovery that I wanted to push early on.

BW:  As far as I'm concerned a lot of it was technically pulling off the stuff that Jon and Dorian had wanted.  They had pretty good ideas of what they wanted before the programmers were brought onto the project.  So a lot of what I had was, “well let's figure out how in fact we can do this.”  And I won't say all of it was easy, some of it was actually kinda hard.

DS: And they really pull it off too.  I mean the first time that you run into Elizabeth and she fills the screen and you're approaching her in the throne room, you just know that it's something different and new because it's not any longer somebody just kind of floating in a window.  You're like there and you're talking to the person and they're angry and they're squinting at you – it's really really cool.

ET: Firaxis likes to do things themselves – and when they are reinventing a game, like they are doing with Civilization V, they need specific tools to accomplish the task. Civ V has been built, literally, from the ground up – engine and all.

BW:  Well yeah there was a lot that we had to start from scratch on.  We had realized the limitations of the previous code that we had and the previous tools and decided that if we wanted to pull this off we'd have to build new tools and a new engine.  And we, especially for the terrain, that required a pretty much 100% new approach to how we were doing the graphics and trying to get the performance to a level that was needed to do the effect that was wanted.  Since we were gonna add more units on the screen at once we had to find ways to be able to render more of them and to keep them animated without bogging the game down.  And with the modding tools that we have we really wanted to push where we already had done successful stuff with Civ IV and take it to a new level, giving new tools like our new world builder that pretty much lets you build any scenario you want quickly.  And it was an investment in technology.  I mean it's stuff that we'll be using long term, but it's stuff that needed to be done.

DS:  And we think people, once they see the game in action – we had a little bit of this when we showed the game at PAX – is that people are generally unbelieving that that's possibly a Civilization game because it just looks amazing.  The graphics team with Dan Baker, and Josh Barczak, John Kloetzli – they just went all out with driving everything that they could into this game while still keeping it as working as possible on older machines which is what I think is the most surprising.  We've got a few versions of the game.  For instance we have something for DX9 and DX11, they're working on deploying the 64-bit version so we're looking at it scaling extremely well whether you're on bleeding edge or whether you're on something older.

ET: Civilization V looks different, the opposing civilizations play different and immerse you in the role of leader, and while all of this may seem very similar to a long-time Civ player, going in to the game with your Civ IV strategy-cap on will not yield you a victory. (Trust me, I know this from personal experience.) Likewise, as a newcomer to the franchise, there are some very simple new aspects of the game that sets Civ V apart from other strategy titles you may have played in the past – elements that you will need to master in order to succeed.

JS: I think a good example of that would be the city-states.  They really change the diplomatic flavor of the game.  In previous games it was very much a competition with every other player.  You wanted to beat them all.  None of them were on your side.  The city-states are a big departure from that because they don't ever, you know, purposefully go and fight you, they're not trying to win the game, they're not gonna really go and expand and cut you off.  They're there to be your friend in some ways.  Or, you know, to have you conquer them.  And that's something that's really new to the game and we think that's really going to shake up particularly on the diplomatic side of things how people play the Civ game.

DN:  One thing that changes the way that I play the game is the way that I build up an army.  It's very hard to hide the fact that you're building up an army unless you build it very close to the center of your capital.  And when you send out an army it's very easy to see how big of a force you're bringing and whether you have catapults or not.  And so the timing and the way that you maneuver around the battlefield and the way that you engage the enemy is radically different and it's very rewarding when you take someone out.

DS: Me personally?  I have new features and game moments every day.  Today's actually has been the feeling you get with (inaudible) of sweeping ahead of your armies with these gorgeous helicopter gunships and laying waste to everything, opening the way for your armor to drive in behind it and destroy everything else.

BW: Well I like the new tactical combat a lot.  And I know that Dorian kind of was hinting at that but the fact that units have better roles and better defined roles than they may have in earlier Civs.  An archer shoots from range.  As long as there's space between him and his enemy he can safely lob arrows at that guy all day.  Now if somebody gets close to him then he's probably dead.  But it's a matter of how you position is every bit as important as just what you bring to the battlefield.

DS:  And aside from cool stuff like gunships I'm normally a builder and a culture player, and the stuff that Jon's done with culture, it was probably, at least from my perspective, something that he really went to great lengths to make it right.  Because we wanted to make culture really interesting and have a really big impact in the game and what he managed to accomplish with culture and the policy tree was really intriguing because now with culture you're actually unlocking all of these abilities all throughout time for your civilization as a whole.  And the results of it means that you can have something completely different in terms of a civilization.  Not just in terms of the units and the buildings that you have but of the way your whole kingdom works, all based on culture which is strikingly different from how it was before and an immense amount of fun.

DN: I'm also getting a kick out of how differently you play to beat the game from a different approach.  The way that you would play culturally versus the way that you wanna play diplomatically.  It's sort of been fun to hear new features that are being added in and playing through them and seeing how different of an experience it is.  It makes me wanna, you know, as we're continuing to refine the game, it makes me wanna play through again the way I beat it a month ago to see all the other new little additions that have changed.  I don't know, it's just very exciting.  It feels new each time I boot it up and I have a different idea of how to approach it and I find that to be pretty exciting.

ET: Obviously, we’ve still only touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of all things Civilization V, however, we have many more podcasts to dig deeper into all of these topics (and more that we haven’t even touched on today.) Before I let the guys go, though, I did have one last question. The team, as you may know, is very in tune with their community – always reading the forums and getting feedback from fans. Since Civilization V’s announcement, they have already received a boatload of feedback, and reactions to new features have been nothing short of passionate. Looking forward, knowing all the other information that is yet to be revealed, I wanted to know how they expected people to receive the journey we were about to take them on.

DS:  I fully expect people to be buying six to seven copies of the game in the first couple weeks.

JS:  Or else...  Yeah, obviously there are going to be some people that are really excited about the changes we made and there's gonna be other people that aren't quite as thrilled.
BW:  Yeah the, “you've broken my favorite feature...”

JS: Yeah, sorry guys.  But the main thing we really want to do with Civ V is to put forward something new and this is something Dennis was touching upon.  We didn't wanna make Civ 4.5, you know.  Civ IV has been made.  It's an excellent game.  It's not going anywhere.  So we really wanna push the envelope and try new things and see, you know, what we could explore in the Civ universe and still make a Civ game but, you know, again try new things and make it real exciting and give a reason for people to come back to Civ and really want to play it and get excited about it again, even if they've been playing for the 20 years that the franchise has been around.

DS: There's always gonna be a mindset switch that's needed because if you've been playing Civilization IV for the last 4 years of your life and you suddenly have to switch to something new there's going to be a period where people are like, “this isn't familiar to me.  What do I do?  How do I do this?”  And we've actually gone to great lengths to put systems in place in the game to kind of shepherd people from one of the other ones so they can understand what's going on and kinda jump in.  And for those that never ever ever wanna change we've got a great suite of modding tools for Civilization V that will allow them to insert the functionality that they would like into the game as well.

DN:  My hope from the art side is that as interesting or as challenging as the changes have been, after you play Civ V and you load up Civ IV you can't go back and you decide to say, “oh darn it I like how much this looks so much, let me give it another round.”  And then you realize how great and deep the game is underneath there.  And we spent a lot of time making sure that hopefully as you play nothing feels accidental.  We're trying to give you an illustrated experience and that means we spent a lot more time making sure all the button art, all the wonders that you see in the game are sort of hand painted, they look hand crafted so you know that each part of the game was cared about.  We just didn't fill in the blanks.  We really wanted to make people feel rewarded at each level as they went and played through history.

ET: To end the session, Pete Murray, Firaxis’ Marketing Associate (who you don’t hear from directly in this recording, but I assure you will be around in time) asked what he called a “Fresh Air Question” – Everyone on the dev team came from a Civ background and, like myself, had strong emotions to be at the helm of such a history game. How did that feel? What was it like, to know you were going to be creating the game that would be called Civilization V?

DN:  For me it was a mixed bag because having been around for a while you always take for granted, you know, the franchises that you have.  And so I was both going, “oh no this is a really huge thing and I could really screw it up.”  There's that fear.  And the other side of me was like, “I wanna make whoever follows me in this role have a very hard time.”  So I don't know if that's – I mean I was thrilled because, you know, being a fan you always have 3 or 4 things you'd love a chance to fix.  And visually I was like, “well this is the – if I don't like these few things, this is the time to fix it.”  And I'm given that responsibility.  But it's very humbling to think about how many people play the game and see it and a lot of times Civ is a game that's loved by the game players and the art is secondary.  And I definitely didn't wanna ruin a game by making the art get in the way of the game play and so I wanted to be very careful with that balancing act.

DS:  Dorian pretty much touched on it in terms of thrilling and terrifying at the same time.  Because you're taking on something as storied as Civilization, Sid Meier's greatest work, and saying we're gonna make Civilization V.  It's the followup to Civilization IV considered, you know, best strategy game of all time.  And you're gonna do something that's gonna be even cooler.  So in that term it's an incredible challenge and you're like, “wow this is something that can be really amazing” and “holy crap I really hope we don't screw this up.”  And now that we're where we're at – at this particular time we're, you know, halfway through alpha – it's right there and I think that we've really really pulled it off.  But when you first start on this?  Yeah it can be pretty terrifying knowing what you're working with.

JS:  For me it was – when I first found out I was actually, from that point on I was very focused on the game and I kinda hit the ground running.  At that point it was just Dorian and I and, you know, Dorian – I love the man but he can't program.

DN:  Working on the AI these past few months has been great...

JS:  Yeah we've moved the entire art team onto AI.  You'll find out what the results of that are soon.  But for me I was mainly – I was excited by the opportunity.  As a long-time Civ fan there were a lot of things that I wanted to do and at that point the sky was the limit.  We knew we wanted to do things differently.  There was some things that we planned on changing.  Hexes were something that came out really early.  The combat system was something that came out really early.  And just hit the ground running on those things and have just been plugging away ever since then on them.

DS:  And when he says he's been plugging away since then he means that literally.  He actually hasn't stopped to sleep or eat or go to see a movie, probably in the last two years or so.
JS:  About three I think.

BW: Like Dorian and Dennis, it was a combination of being very excited at the opportunity and scared – terrified of, “god can we pull this off?”

ET: Thank you for joining me for the first episode of the Civilization V Podcast series. I’m Elizabeth Tobey, and we’ll be back next time for a more in-depth look at the latest iteration of this world-renowned series from Firaxis.

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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.

 

Elizabeth Tobey: The hallways of Firaxis are fairly quiet these days – the time before beta, when everyone has their head down and is working tirelessly to perfect the upcoming game. But the walls of studio are lined with artwork – from concept sketches to renders in almost every phase of polish – because Civilization V does not lack style. From the UI to the elaborately designed unit icons, art was a major focus for the game’s creators.

In our second episode of the Civilization V podcast series, I sit down with Dorian Newcomb, Lead Artist, and Arne Schmidt, Building and Structures Lead, and discuss how they created the look of the game. To begin, I lob a big one at Dorian and ask him to explain to me what was his major objective when designing the game.

Dorian Newcomb: Wow. We had a series of objectives and the two I think that relate to the world the best are that we wanted the world to look vast and diverse so when you looked across the landscape you’d see a wide range of textures and shapes and colors and as you explored different regions of the world you would discover more continents, different types of vegetation, just more stuff. And then as you played the game and as you developed your civilization the hope would as you improved your land you’d be transforming the chaos into something more ordered. And that’s a lot of what Arne was bringing in. So I give him these large goals – “hey make chaos into order.” And then he makes things happen.

Arne Schmidt: And then on top of that, he also asked us to make it look both believable and somewhat romanticized. So a lot of it has been sort of trying to take somewhat differing ideals and make the two things work together. One of the things we’ve sort of said is that we want Civ V to look kind of like the Hollywood version of history in that everything is glitzy and glamorous and it’s not gritty and dark like the dark ages. We want it to be a journey you want to go on.

ET: That look Arne talks about – the Hollywood version of history – has another term in the studio. Some call it Works Progress (which may evoke many different images for those of you who are history buffs.) This design concept helped guide the look and feel of the game tremendously.

DN: We actually have a few different terms that we throw around when we were describing the art style of the game. So our initial inspiration was historical fiction and Hollywood epics. From that idea of playing through history, as we approached other parts of the game we decided to take on visuals that matched our history that tend to be important in history. So we have a bunch of wonder paintings and those are displayed as 19th century romanticized history paintings. And when it came to the interface, there were two different parts to the interface. There’s the framing elements and those are the things that – outline, the button shapes, the colors – and a form of architecture that’s really successful in compartmentalizing parts is art deco. And so we knew that we wanted to have art deco inspiration as the way that we would frame the game. But within those panels and the illustrations that you saw, it was really exciting. The WPA arts movement that happened when Roosevelt was trying to get America out of the depression had great poster images and very good reads at a glance and we know that we want people to look at the button and understand exactly what it is right away. And so it was a combination of the art deco style and the WPA styling interface that I was really excited about putting together. And once we put it together it just seemed to fit and we didn’t need to look at it again, just go with it.

ET: This grand art style really does echo the basis of the game, because Civilization is not just a strategy series. It is a game where you control history and mold famous empires to your own particular style. While history is the backbone of this game, you have the power to remake time. But beyond that feeling and power of being the master of history and time, the world had to look believable – the ground, trees, and water all feel very real and organic. Balancing that realism with the Hollywood ideal was no easy task.

AS: Well I’m predominantly responsible for cities. One of the things we tried to do with cities is that in previous Civs cities pretty much start in the center of a square and just grow straight out in all directions and we’re trying to change that. We’re trying to give it a road network. We’re trying to have it relate to the terrain. So if you build a city on the coast it actually sits on the coast. And a lot of this was helped by the way that the world looks because we used hexes instead of squares. No matter how you lay out a square grid the human eye will always tell you it is a square grid. But as soon as you add those two extra sides to every tile, everything starts looking more organic. And a little bit of variation in any given line going along those six sides stops looking like a pre-planned line. So the whole world looks more organic and diverse than it’s ever looked before and now we’re putting cities inside that organic environment that look more specific and in place in that world than they’ve ever looked before.

DN: In a lot of ways this involved trust with the programmers as we were trying things that an artist on their own couldn’t just put into a game. We showed a lot of concepts, we had a lot of conversations with some very smart, almost brilliant - maybe brilliant, I’ll give them brilliant – programmers. And they would say well if you want this look, it will take me a few months to implement this series of very complex names that I can’t give you right now. That’ll be another podcast. And what we would do is we would make the art in pieces the way that you’d put together just about any game. But they’d arrange it in a way that was based on concepts and create that variety and that excitement level. But if we didn’t have a good trust relationship and if we weren’t communicating the same ideas we would have never gotten such a stellar look.

AS: In fact this is the – of all the games I’ve ever worked on – this has been the one where I’ve had the most back and forth interaction with a programmer who was helping me make my art look the way I wanted it to in the game but also have it look unique every time you see it. Previously, again, if you get back to a square grid it makes things look the same every time. So it’s very easy to go to a programmer and say, “ok on this square grid I want it to look this way” and they’re gonna make it look exactly that way. But now that we’ve got this much more organic world we have a lot more flexibility in what we can do so the programmers are having to take on sort of an artistic concept which we’re kind of guiding them in how to realize in the game. So there’s been a lot of back and forth between the two disciplines, much more so than on any previous project I’ve worked on.

ET: Making an organic and believable world is one enormous task in its own right, but Civilization V required more than just a static, believable world. You begin at the dawn of time and go far into the future over the course of the game, and the art had to change significantly to evoke that movement through the ages.

AS: Well there’s two ways that that happens. It grows in time chronologically and then as you get more advanced the world gets more advanced, your buildings and improvements and units get more technologically advanced. But as the same time, as you’re exploring the world, we’ve made it so that the various continents look very different from each other. So you may start the game with one set of colors being the predominant set, you cross a small stretch of ocean and all of a sudden the landscape looks totally different. The lighting will be different, the colors of the trees, the ground, everything about the world evolves as you’re moving through it. So there’s sort of two paths to how the game looks different as you progress through it. The things you’ve already revealed update through time and the things that you haven’t revealed are different as you encounter them.

DN: As far as changing the look as well. You know, Civ is a game not just where you have battles or where you build cities but it’s also a game where every part of the landscape you’re gonna want to develop and change. And so early on with the road networks as Arne was describing we started to add farms and even pretty early on as you’re playing it looks like a wilderness and it gets transformed into beautiful farmland country and you have, you know, spices in rows and wine in rows that are being developed. And just that alone, cultivating the land and seeing the players decisions change everything about the terrain that they’re on I think is pretty compelling.

ET: Compelling is a very modest way to encapsulate the look Arne and Dorian have achieved with Civilization V. From an outsider who has tinkered with the different builds as they creep closer and closer to the final version, watching the world grow and change around me is nothing short of awesome. You have total control over the landscape, and want to honor the ground that your civilization grows out of, and through all the details beyond the game itself – from the tiniest detail on the HUD to the changing icons of units and buildings – the art style more than successfully creates a compelling world that you want to spend tens (or in my case hundreds) of hours immersed in.

I’m Elizabeth Tobey, and this concludes the second episode of the Civilization V podcast series. We’ll be back next time to take a closer look at the characters of the game.

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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.

 

Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to Episode Three of the Civilization V Podcast Series. Today, I am joined by Brian Busatti, Lead Modeler and Environment Artist, and Chris Hickman, Lead Animator, to talk about the art and characters in Civilization V. Because while Civilization may be a game about remaking history and ruling famous empires yourself, you are also pitted against famous personalities from all ages, and doing those likenesses justice was no easy task. The characters are not merely 3D representations of historical figures, but a depiction of these people to fit within the world and character of the entire game, and I wanted to know what the team’s process looked like to create these characters.

Brian Busatti: Well first of all we got together as a group of designers and artists and animators and just decided kind of what personality traits were the most important parts for the leaders. And we came up with the ages and kind of their motivations and just basically traits that they would have. Some you might expect, some we decided to choose or change a little bit to adjust because of the game play style.

Chris Hickman: In terms of how we start animating a character, we try to get inside their head kind of, try to figure out what they stand for, what do they want out of life, what motivates them, are they thoughtful, impulsive – and from there, that guides us in how we figure how they react to different situations. We tried to make sure that out of all the leaders in the game, no two personalities are alike at all. You get a different experience with each leader that you play with.

ET: As I said before, leaders span all the ages – you can haggle with Caesar and Gandhi in the same game. Choosing the empires to appear in Civilization is no easy task, and picking the perfect figure to represent that empire is perhaps even more difficult. Being able to meld those people together into a coherent story? Well, that’s the challenge Brian and Chris struggle with every day.

BB: Well I mean you can't avoid the different time periods. We just try to keep a consistent style in our artwork. For example, a lot of the leaders, we went with an idealized form and we didn't wanna make Gandhi like – in the past we've had characters like Gandhi look kinda weak. He's almost like a cartoon character; we exaggerate a lot of his proportions. In this example we really wanted to make him look more idealized and look more powerful. Some of that stuff came from references we found – we found this one really cool-looking statue of him that just showed a lot of power in him. It still represented Gandhi but we felt that was a really good basis for the model. And uh getting back to like the difference between Washington and Caesar – the main thing was we wanted the personality to come through, and we wanted the environments to play a bigger part. So you're visiting their world, you're not necessarily looking for somebody that's in the same time period.

CH: Conceptually how it was explained to me was we wanted to place the player in a direct interaction with a character. We didn't want it to feel like it was stock footage that came from the 1930's or this was theatrical stuff that was filmed many years ago. We want it to be a live interaction. What the player does, the leader is reacting to you, so we wanted to make sure that it was a very live-feeling thing. We didn't use theatrical style cameras. We tried to make it a shot sort of from a POV of the player so you just feel like you're there standing with the person.

ET: Chris talks about one of the most obvious changes for leaders in Civilization V: You no longer see them just as a head as in previous iterations of the series, but instead as a full character, standing in a scene that makes sense with their history and adds to the impact of their words and mannerisms, speaking in their native tongues. These settings were considered and polished just as much as the character models. Without one, the other would not be nearly as powerful.

BB: Oh it was really important. If you look at some of the differences between some of the characters like Askia is in a very, like it's a war-torn environment. Smoldering buildings and just destruction everywhere. You realize right away that he's not somebody that's going to be easy to get along with. And then you look at somebody like Gandhi who's much more peaceful. And it kinda goes with their game play style like the AI for the character.

CH: And just kind of in hitting some of those personality things and the differences – Gandhi was really an important leader to me. I wanted to make sure he wasn't treated as a caricature. I wanted to be very respectful to who he was and who he stood for. He was animated by Greg Marlow who did a wonderful job. Gandhi is strong in his convictions and his personality, not in his military might. You may be fighting him in the game but his real weapon when interacting with you is kind of making you think are you making moral choices that are correct, instead of, “I'm going to come at you with a whole army.” So we have leaders that go from the selfless side, like Gandhi, to someone who is much more selfish, like Augustus Caesar, who is just bored with the whole situation. He doesn't care about the player. You're there, he doesn't really look at you. He doesn't really interact with you. The only time he really notices you is if you defeat him and he says, “oh you're kind of a worthy opponent after all.” And even going further than that – and Greg Marlow also animated Caesar. He got to do a very wide range of personalities and did a great job. Askia is kind of on the extreme far end of that. He is very self-righteous. He is a very powerful character and he believes he's doing God's bidding. So whatever he does is right morally. If you defeat him, his thoughts are, “you're gonna burn in hell.” So it's a huge range there from trying to make people to make better choices to thinking you're damned for what you do.

ET: The difficulties of creating a cohesive look and feel for each character in concept was no small task, and once those concepts were finalized, making them believable and beautiful from a technical standpoint was a new and interesting challenge altogether. In fact, throughout my visit to the studio, Pete Murray, Marketing Associate at Firaxis, kept raving about Montezuma, who they had just finished before I arrived, and how amazing the fire and feathers looked in his final render. These characters have their own specific technology to make them look as realistic and imposing as possible.

BB: Yeah there's actually, we've got a lot more technology behind this than past products. If you start with Civ IV, and you look at the very small window that you could see the leader, basically there's shoulders and some hand movement with a simple background. The next project we did was Civ Revolution and we decided to go with the waist. So they weren't leader heads, it's a tough thing to break. We keep calling them leader heads but then they became leader torsos. But it was a really cool way to get more personality because you're not just seeing the small window, you're actually seeing broad arm movements. But they didn't have backgrounds because we wanted a weather man effect. Civ V we wanted to just go with full character – put them in any kind of situation we wanted to. And the backgrounds and environments became just as important as the character themselves.

CH: In animation we've been super impressed with the work that modeling has done on the environments and the characters and they really drive us to have to work even harder on the animation to try to hold that up because they're doing such an idealized fantastic looking set of models and stuff if we slip up on our side it really shows so they've really helped guide us into doing a better job all around.

BB: And there's a lot of back and forth too between modeling and animation. It's really important to make sure that the model is going to animate correctly so we have to communicate all the time. I send stuff to Chris, he checks it out. Sometimes he makes some modifications to them but, you know, there's a lot of teamwork involved in it. We've got a really solid team working on it.

CH: We up ressed the rigs on the characters up. 3D characters are driven by essentially points in space that form bones in a character. I don't know the exact amount because I didn't work here at the time but I think in some of the earlier version of Civilization a character might have 200 bones in them. The base character that we use in this game has 1200 bones. Some of them go to 1800, 2000 bones. Luckily they've done a great job on the engine and I can throw tons of things at it and it still runs it great. We created a custom rig for the faces so that the animators can, in 2d, essentially sculpt the shapes that they need to be able to do the lip sync and the performance and it makes it a lot easier, faster, and a lot more interactive.
BB: We also have some really powerful shaders now. One of the most – my favorite things – is the subsurface skin scattering. It really makes the skin feel more alive and less plasticky – gives them a lot of warmth that you don't see in a regular standard shader. We have a lot of different materials that we can simulate now, we're a pretty powerful system. We can do really convincing cloth velvet. We have a hair tangent shader that works really well to simulate how the highlights change on the hair. That's just some of the shaders we have, and there's different ways we can mix them.

Pete Murray: Just real quick, are there leaders that you particularly like the way they come across in the game?

ET: You just want to talk about Montezuma right now.

PM: I love Montezuma! He's awesome!

ET: That’s Pete, who I talked about just a minute ago. I told you he liked Montezuma.

CH: Actually we can – one of the things that's kind of interesting when you're thinking the character is everybody reacts to a situation differently. Catherine, for example, who was animated by Greg Cunningham, is very flirtatious and very much involved with the player. Montezuma is in a theatrical setting and he's actually playing to a large audience and the player is actually just a pawn in the game that he's playing with the large audience around him. So trying to decide how the leader is reacting to the situation he's in is very important to driving the animation.

BB: Montezuma is one of my favorites. The scene and just the character model in general. David Jones is the modeler that worked on him. He did a great job with it. It's kind of sad – it's like, “oh he'd be so cool to model” but I'm really happy with what he did with it. And the animation just comes together really well.

CH: He was animated by Alex Kim and he did a great job on him. And just in terms of sort of some of the accuracy we tried to get along the way, Oda who was really well animated by Dan Perry is the Japanese leader, and my wife is Japanese so she actually came in and sat in for the audio recordings to make sure those were done precisely and then instead of my actually directing that performance I would take play blasts home to my wife and she would tell us if it was reading as the Japanese performance that was relatively accurate. And she would find footage for us to look at, suggesting this is how Oda might have acted. So that was very helpful. Wu, who is the Chinese Empress in the game, was actually animated by a Chinese animator – so as much as we can get it correct for the culture that it's from.

ET: Leaders in Civilization V are much like the historical gameplay – realistic and immersive, yet distinct enough to allow you to stray from the realities of the past and make the world your own. They are technical and visual marvels – feathers and fire, fur and silk – and they are more alive than any Civ leaders in the past, complete with their own mannerisms, voices, and languages (even the dead ones.) The team left no stone unturned in creating complete and lifelike characters and beautiful settings to place them in for you to negotiate and collude with, or perhaps threaten and war against. It’s all up to you.

This concludes the third episode of the Civilization V Podcast Series. Join us next time as I round up the audio team to discuss the sounds of the game.

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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.

 

Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to the fourth episode of the Civilization V Podcast Series. I’m Elizabeth Tobey, and today, Michael Curran, Audio Lead, and Geoff Knorr, Composer and Orchestrator, sit down with me to talk about the sounds and music of Civilization V and how they make the world feel living, breathing, and believable.

Michael Curran: You know when you talk about believability, it's, it's believable rather than realistic because of game play and just the kind of odd scale and things that the player needs to hear. But um, we, in previous iterations of Civ, we really only had a world ambiance for the tile that you're selected on. And it was an audio soundscape. You know, if you were centered on a forest, you got a little breeze, and leaves, and birds, and things like that – little forest noises. And it was, you know, very, you know, believable forest ambiance. However as a player if you're looking at the screen you see all this other stuff around. You know we were kind of limited by what we could do and so in Civ Rev, you know, sort of wanted to help that along a little. And we did manage to put ocean waves on objects that were near the coast. So it kinda gave it a little bit more, you know, a little bit more realistic feel to it, but we were limited by the objects. So if there were no fish or there was a die resource near the coast – if those weren't around, we didn't get the ocean. So in Civ V, you know, really very early on planned to try to get everything. You know, everything you could see we wanted to be able to hear it in a very realistic way. And uh, and we achieved that. So I think um, you know, it's a much more believable scene when you're looking at it.

ET: Michael talks about ambient noise – the game’s soundscape – which is something gamers may not immediately notice and appreciate when playing the game. Ambient noise, after all, is supposed to blend into the background. The way Civilization V handles these natural sounds of the world around your units, however, brings forward the sounds of the forest, the splashing of whales along the coast, the chirping of birds… And really boosts the impact of moving from tundra to icy terrain. But the realistic sounds don’t stop with just nature. Battle is something that cannot be avoided in Civilization V, and having a realistic battle necessitates realistic battle sounds.

MK: Well the same sort of believable vs. real exists there too, you know? We, you know, came to Civ V with the ability to put um, individual sounds attached to the animations so that, you know, when a character in a unit puts his foot down you hear a footstep and so on. As much detail as we wanted to put into it. With Civ IV and Civ Rev, you know, if you have three units down – three characters down at once doing things – it's a lot of sounds firing off, OK? And it sounds pretty good, I mean I like the result of it but with Civ V we knew we were gonna have – well originally we didn't really know. We knew it was gonna be a lot more um um – and so we did some mockups of combat with groups of characters in a unit fighting each other. And, you know, immediately it, you know, we knew we didn't, we weren't interested in putting feet down for, you know, we just needed, you know, an overall ambiance of movement. You know, so we did these group mixes that sounded very believable for a large group fighting. And so then it was just a question of how are we gonna implement this, because as your characters die off in the unit, you might be left with two, or three, or one. And so we still needed the basic marker system. We still needed to be able to call a foot where a foot hit and you know, a gun smacking an arm. You know, all those little details still needed to be there. So um, so what we're, what we ended up with is a system that uses those – all the unit characters have lots of detail synced little sounds that go with the animations but as the group has more than three characters, let's say, you know, four to ten, we drop out some of those markers and play a group sound. And then there's another group sound for a larger group. So it kinda uses a combination of both. We still need the specific sound on queue for things like gunfire or people falling and things like that. So it's a mix of both and uh, yeah I think it's a pretty good system and calls a lot less sounds.

ET: Beyond soundscapes and battle cries, there is no lack of music in Civilization V. Each empire has its own distinct musical score with many variations depending on the situation at hand. The team put an enormous amount of work into making those sounds work perfectly which each individual civilization.

MK: OK, well, you know, there are a couple things we wanted to do when we set out to, you know, come up with a good audio design for Civ V. And one thing that I've always wanted to do since I've worked on Civ games is to try to bring in more – and this goes for just sound in general, the speech, rather, along with music – is to really represent all the cultures, all the civs that we have in the game more equitably. Civ IV sound track was entirely western based and by error. So we want that Asian music, we want to have middle eastern and so on. And so we knew we wanted to have a much broader range of music. And in addition to that, um, you know we wanted to um, we wanted to also evoke that culture with speech. So all the leaders, we decided, would speak their own language. And so there's a real different feel for the game depending on who you play as. And so, and Jeff feel free to chime in! You give a good deal to music. Jeff and I both composed most of the music in the game that we did here in house. But anyway, getting back to the sound track design. So we have four regions in the world and that's reflected in the art too. So for each region, we have two playlists: war and peace. So when you're at peace with everybody you get the peace playlist. And when you start to be at war with another civ, it goes to the war sound track playlist. And most of that is licensed music that we've selected.

Geoff Knorr: Yeah um, well for the leaders, what Michael and I have done and – well we've done most the leaders and Roland and Ian have done I think one or two. But we made these leader pieces to kind of represent the leader when they're at peace and when they're at war. And we wanted to take an actual melody from that leaders culture and make it into this kind of – combine it with the western orchestra and make this really awesome representative piece of that culture. So usually the first step was just searching, trying to find what that melody is that when someone from that culture listens they'll pick it out and they'll be, “yeah, that's my country.” And so we wanted that sense of national pride to be there in the melodies we chose. We tried as hard as we could – sometimes we end up with, you know, with ancient Rome, we end up with just little fragments that we found of stuff. So once we find something then it's just a matter of sketching things out and trying out different ethnic instruments and combining those with the symphony orchestra instruments and I think in most of my pieces the melody is more obvious in the peace – when you're at peace with a leader. And then in the war piece, I'll do different things with it like invert it, or do it backwards, and do all these kind of like compositional things which maybe people will catch up when they listen, we'll see.

MK: As a player your experience is much more specific to that culture that you're playing as than it ever has been before. So when you start a game, the player will first hear their own leader's peace music and that starts the game sound track. And then when that's through, it goes through the peace playlist of that region. So if you're, you know, if you're playing as Napoleon you'll get Napoleon's peace theme, and then it'll go through a Europe peace sound track playlist, until you go to war. One of the neat things that we did with leader music here that's different from the other Civs is that it really is integrated with the sound track completely. I mean you hear the leader music in the world, you hear it in the leader screens, and, you know, hopefully it all meshes together very well. I think it does, but... But if you go to a leader screen and you might declare war – and when that happens you get the leader's war music and then that would continue until it was through and then you would go through a war playlist of your region.

ET: Beyond sounds, beyond music, there was one last auditory aspect of Civilization V I wanted to know more about: The languages of the leaders. For the first time ever, when you meet a head of state, you hear them speak in their own language – even if that language is a dead language by modern standards.

MK: We knew of a studio that was very good at finding just about any language you could come up with, including dead languages. And so we knew where to go to find actors for this. And so all the speech was recorded. We directed it – basically Dorian N. was very involved in that and he had a good sense of the character so he did most of the directing of that. And then the artists are lip syncing the animations to it and so our involvement has not been real – all that much really. Just sort of coordinating it all so it happens and then the artists are really doing everything with that.

JN: Sometimes it's really exciting to hear the different languages like I remember when we did Ramses I think it was – you just listen to this guy, and he just sounds terrifying.

ET: I’m sure the guys have properly illustrated how much music and sound is in Civilization V and how they are trying to push the believable world into new and different realms by immersing senses beyond sight into the game. And, if you’ve seen the first Civilization V trailer (which I’m sure all of you have) you have already heard a slice of the game already. The music in that trailer is a slice of Elizabeth’s war music. So you might want to go and give the video another watch (and listen) to see how that changes things for you.

We’ll be back next time with the fifth episode of our podcast series, focusing on the game’s engine.

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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.

 

Elizabeth Tobey: For the fifth episode of the Civilization V podcast series, I sit down to talk with part of the team who created the new engine for the game. As you are probably aware, building an engine from scratch is not an easy task. Dan Baker, Graphics Lead at Firaxis, described the experience for me.

Dan Baker: So, you know, it's kind of like building a car road – you build your own engine. And the answer is if you're just wanting to get from point A to point B you probably wouldn't, but if you're a formula 1 race car you build your own stuff because it has to be competitive. And the honest truth is that Civ deserves a custom engine. We aren't building a generic game, we're building Civ, and so the engines on the market aren't really suited to the type of game, so we really felt pretty strongly that we should build an engine that's going to give the Civ player the best experience.

ET: Tim Kipp, Systems Lead on Civilization V, further explains more about why they created a new engine, and what the team gained from the endeavor.

Tim Kipp: I mean Dan is exactly right in that when we looked at what Civ V needed and we talked to the designer, and we talked to the lead artist, and we talked to everybody else, we realized that there was really nothing on the market that was going to be as scalable as what we wanted and provide the game player at the end of the day the experience that was really sufficient for what Civ V could be. So with their help and their guidance they let us go ahead and build it from scratch and the successful part about that for us is that we've been able to take the designer's vision and the artist's vision and we haven't had to compromise yet in terms of what it is that they wanted. And that was really our – you know the goal wasn't necessarily just could we get there as fast as we possibly could but could we actually create the vision that these guys wanted to have for the game and I think by and large we've been able to do that.

DB: And in my kind of geeky technical thing, there are really two things that we thought – that we really wanted to be able to do that we thought needed a custom engine. One is that we really wanted to make these random believable worlds. Unlike a lot of games or this carefully scripted experience, Civ is about randomness. It's about randomness but a unique world every time you play so we really wanted to have these random worlds that looked as good as hand-made stuff. So there was no technology on the market – we had to invent a lot of stuff to be able to do that. And the other thing is that Civ is also a game about scale. I mean the game has a lot of stuff in it. I mean your world fills up with – Tim's laughing – the amount of stuff that you can build it's beyond what any game does. So we have to be able to – the needs of our game exceed most games by an order of magnitude. So that was the two major reasons why we realized we needed to build something custom.

John Kloetzli: I just have to say that this is the first project that I've worked on where we've completely built our own stuff from scratch and just as an engineer working on the system it's been much easier than having to conform to someone else's ideas of what you should be because you only build the parts that you need and you build them exactly the way that you need them. You don't have to conform anything to someone else's idea of what a game engine should be. Just from my perspective as a graphics engineer that was much less frustrating than a typical project.

Josh Barczak: Yeah it definitely gives you a lot of freedom during development that you just wouldn't have if you started with an entire code base ready-made. You don't always know what your exact requirements are going to be so the best way to build something that meets your exact requirements is to just do it from the ground up.

ET: That’s John Kloetzli, Graphics Programmer, and Josh Barczak, Senior Graphics Programmer, who were also integral in making the Civilization V engine come to life. By now, you’ve probably noticed a pattern emerging in what these guys are talking about – scalability being a big buzz word that keeps returning whenever they talk about the how and why of the new engine. Civilization V is, in fact, very, very scalable (amazingly so in my opinion. I can’t tell you how floored I was to hear about the gamut of machines that the game will run on.) Making the game so resilient to a wide swath of different computers – from commuter laptop to beefy gaming machine – must have been a lofty goal.

TK: I think there was a lot of careful planning that went into the design of the engine very very early on. I think there was also a lot of sort of very honestly looking at how games are produced, what needs to go into it. So effectively we've probably pulled away a lot of the extra glue and a lot of the extra (inaudible) that wind up weighing down a lot of engines and what we've got is something that's very clean. Very small set of code that does exactly what we want it to with very little to no side effects. And that's something that Dan designed the graphics layer from the ground up to be completely like that. And then we've designed the rest of the engine to be very very similar in that everything is there for a reason. There's nothing there that doesn't belong there and there's no code that gets executed for no reason whatsoever. And that's allowed us, at least in terms of efficiency, to scale very well on a single core. The second side of that is that Dan and I looked very hard at threading scalability in terms of how games typically wind up implementing that. Most of the games and the game engines you'll find out there are very functionally threaded which means they'll run physics on a thread, they'll run graphics on a thread. It's very very coarse. Very very coarse and beyond say the Xbox that doesn't scale very well. Once you get to quad core and beyond you just wind up running out of functional elements and you wind up requiring to subdivide. However if you design for a functional paradigm what happens is that trying to break that up into smaller pieces now introduces additional overhead. So we design everything from the ground up to be job-based, task-based, very well encapsulated so we've scaled up to, what is it, 12...

DB: We've tested on 12 threads but, I mean, we don't have anything more than 12 to test on but we're pretty confident it'll work with a lot more. Yeah it's amazing how it spreads across the whole system.

JB: And I think this also goes back to developing something that does exactly what we need it to do and what we want it to do. The more general – the engines that are out there on the market - the commercial engines – they're designed to be as generic as possible to cater to as many different possible customer configurations as they can and one of the drawbacks of that is the more general you try to be you inherently lose some performance as a result. You're going to be less streamlined. You don't know exactly what you're going to do up front so you kinda have to prepare for the worst case.

DB: And I always liken to – my brother does autocross and he has his own little (inaudible) that he races and when you race on the track, you don't buy like a car off the street like a Civic or something because, you know, it's not designed for that. So his car doesn't have a lot of horsepower but, you know, the backseats are gone, there's no air conditioner, the power windows have been taking out, the tires are exactly special custom, and the thing performs orders of magnitude better. Now it's not a general case, but we're just trying to do something specific and you can get much much better performance and quality when you know this is exactly the type of thing that you're gonna be doing. And I just liken it to, you know, making a sports car or making a bust or something.

JB: I think the other factor too is there really is a culture on this team of making the code as lean and as streamlined as it can possibly be. Which, paying attention to the small details as you're going along, little things add up. There are a lot of little things built into the game.

JK: Yeah I think on this project one of the most valuable lessons is that the senior engineers set the tone for the project and if they're really concerned about the performance and really concerned about code optimization, constantly coming to the more junior guys and saying, “you know this is good but it could be a little better if we did it this way, a little better if we did it this way” - really sets the tone for the project and I think that's one of the main reasons why we're able to get the performance levels that we do get is because a lot of the senior engineers have really set that tone and it's fallen through to the rest of the engineering team.

ET: Clearly, building the back end of the game took many more people than just the four in front of me – as with everything in Civilization V, the team worked as a cohesive whole to make the dream a reality. And in doing so, the team made technical innovations that they should be very proud of. And since so many gamers (myself included) so often never get a chance to look under the proverbial hood of a game and marvel at what makes the thing go – I wanted them to explain it to me.

DB: One of the nice things about working here is that our secret sauce is making the game great. Gameplay great. So the cool thing about that is as a graphics guy I can actually talk about what we do because we don't consider that our competitive edge. And gosh there's so many things technically. Like I had to talk on Tuesday on all the stuff and you forget all the things. So I'll talk about a few of them and these guys can elaborate on some stuff that we did. There's like two different main modes to the game. There's the main game that you see and you're playing and there's this other whole thing where you go in and you actually talk to the leaders. And that's – they're completely different and rather than try and make the same engine part that does both of them they're actually quite a bit different and there's a lot of technology that we threw at it. The first set of technology we did is a lot of stuff – and I'll let John elaborate on some of the stuff that he worked on – was to make these custom worlds and blends. So the gameplay makes a custom world every time you start so one of the goals I had was to build a map that really looked like someone hand-painted it. And there's a lot of subtle technology dealing with that – a lot of procedural things and John if you wanna elaborate on...you did a lot of work on that.

JK: Sure, yeah yeah Dan and I worked on that from the beginning. The terrain in the game is one of the oldest systems – in fact it might be the oldest system in the code base, the oldest Civ V system. So really what Dan and I did – we kind of sat down and said “how can we design this – add in limitations to the way the artists build the art so that we can build things procedurally?” So essentially we have the artist go through and build a large database of pieces which we can then map to whichever map script the designers hand us to build this randomized map on the fly. Because we have a large database of pieces we can pick out special configurations. Like, “oh look here's three mountain pieces that end up, you know, lined in this direction.” We can pick a special hand-made piece from the artist and fit it in there but it's like playing a big game of Tetris – you don't know exactly what's going to be next to you on all the different sides. So we spent a lot of time working on technology to get all these pieces to blend together correctly and then light them and do shadowing calculations and all those things.

DB: One of the stories of the project has been this kind of symbiance between procedure and art direction and we really embraced that. For instance, one thing that happened - it was like a year ago I think about – where John comes in my office and the artist is just having trouble making these coastlines because they have to match up all this stuff exactly. I think we can do it with a spline. I thought about it for a minute and I'm like, “all right, try it. I think you're right I think we can do it with a spline.” So the coastlines and the rivers actually they're called program art. The program actually makes those because it turned out to be so labor-intensive for the artists to do it. And the artists were ecstatic because there's this huge amount of work that they were looking at to making perfect coastlines where we said, “you know what, we think we can make the computer do that tedious job for you.” And there's many other cases I won't get into that we procedurally handle stuff. One case, for instance, is the ice that we're putting in the game is also procedurally done with like artist influences. And, again, because it's a random world you can't hand-build this stuff. You have to have unique stuff so we've really embraced that and that's a very unique Civ.

TK: It's also important to emphasize the fact that not only do you do that procedurally for the artist that the artist still has complete control over the outcome which is I think one of those cases where you didn't just stop, at the “we can generate this procedurally” but you then went the next step further which is really important which is, “how do I give the best control possible to the artist to get the result they want?” And, I mean, that's true throughout the entire terrain system. I mean everything that's there shows up the way the artist wants it to. So it's not just about the fact that we can generate these things procedurally but it's that we can capture what the artist wants to do and then reflect that accurately back.

JK: I think that's one of the big differences between the way the research community looks at procedural generation of graphics content and the way that you have to do it in games. A lot of times – and it's gotten less so over the years – but the research community tends to think of things as completely procedural. I press a button and the terrain comes out the other side.

DB: George Jetson.

JK: Yeah but that's not really useful for us. We have to have controllable procedural. So it's something that the code is filling in all the details but it's controlled at a high level. Very tightly controlled at a high level by the art. We want exactly grassland here and exactly coast here, and that sort of thing.

ET: The balance of art and realism, planned terrain and random, fresh worlds with each new game… Building an engine that expertly executes all of these elements is incredible in its own right. But Firaxis didn’t stop just with that aspect of the engine. In Civilization V, there is an entirely different view beyond the world map – when you approach leaders to wage war, negotiate peace, or barter for important resources – you enter a completely different view, and its visual fidelity is astounding. The way the leader engine works and was built is completely separate from the “main” view of the game.

JB: It's another advantage of having a custom engine. The leader viewer is – Dan likes to jokingly call it the first person shooter that we're embedding into Civ V. It's really a very different system. It's got rendering needs that are fundamentally different than the rest of the game.

ET: You don't shoot the leaders.

JB: No you do not shoot the leaders.

DB: This is our April Fool's Joke.

TK: There could be a mod. There could always be a mod.

JB: What I like the most about it – what I've enjoyed the most about working on it – is that it's essentially a sandbox. I have the entire machine available to me during that time, provided I don't use up too much memory, and I really get to pound on the GPU and to throw as much extra shading and as much extra visual quality into it as I can. It's a great platform for us to really show what we can do graphically.

DB: And it's funny because we got a few comments here and there – people thought they were movies. And like “no those are actually – they're not. They're rendered in real time.”

TK: Well when we first started, you know, we had concept artists that painted these entire scenes and everyone looked at those scenes and said wow those scenes are awesome. And we looked at that and said, “well is there any possible way that we can make that scene look that good in game?” And we had some visitors in I guess it was probably a month ago, and some of the leaders on the wall – we have a giant wall of leaders – half of them were concept art or pre-rendered stuff and the other half were in-game screenshots. And everyone that looked at them had – it took them at least, what, 10 seconds maybe to figure out which ones were which?

DB: Oh yeah it was – we were like, “pick which ones are in-game.” And they're sitting there for a while, looking at them, looking at them. And it wasn't obvious what was actually being rendered and what was the concepts. They didn't look like what we're used to seeing in games so we were pretty happy about that.

JB: And there's another key area of technical innovation in all of the compression stuff that we're doing for the leaders.

DB: Yeah we have a lot of advanced technology in the engine too like a couple publications or one publication probably some pending publications – like the water rendering for instance is pretty high tech. A lot of it is about subtlety. You know people sit there and you don't realize it but we're not about making things flashy. A lot of games they want flashy and I don't know what you would call it – bling, bling is probably it. I got the bling, and we're all about not having the bling. So there's a lot of technology in making it not look blingy and just looking good and you're not gonna realize yeah we spent a lot of time making sure that the water didn't alias, it didn't shimmer, it looked correct when you zoomed in and out. And there's a subtle distance fog that kind of maps in at the edge of the world that's supposed to be very controllable. And we put a lot of time into that and yeah it's not bling, but all of that kind of adds together to give a unified experience.

ET: One of the biggest questions every developer has to grapple with when creating a game is “do I license, or build from scratch?” As with everything in life, there are always limited resources, and limited time, when building a game – so you can’t always do everything, everywhere, amazingly. Firaxis’ decision to make a scalable engine that procedurally generates gorgeous graphical images (in two very distinct ways) is a monumental achievement for games. They didn’t have to go this route. There are dozens of ways that they could have made this task easier and still created a product that would have created a jaw-dropping experience for everyone, but instead, they went far, far above and beyond and made something veritably mind blowing. So far, after showing the game at GDC, E3, and to select press over the past few months, the response to this decision has paid off – people love the game. How did the team think the industry, as a whole, would respond to what they had built – and think about their choice to create rather than license and augment?

DB: Good question, why build your own thing. I hope that from a technology standpoint, and I think people already do and I've talked to – I know a lot of the graphics leads and a lot of perks of the industry, a lot of friends of mine and we trade war stories. We go to GDC and you're on the table and you're telling a war story, “look what my artist did to me” and you know, scar here. “Look what my artist did to me.” And it's interesting hearing what their problems are and one of the things that kind of struck me is how we had built technology in certain areas that just far exceeded what people were telling me was possible. They said, “well you can't do that” and I'm like, “but we are.” And they're like “how are you doing that?” And I'm like “I don't know how you're not!” We don't understand like where certain situations where our performance is just beyond what even the hardware guys are telling us “but you can't do that” and we're like, “but we are.” And so in some situations I hope that the response is, “oh wow look what you can actually do.” A lot of times people say something's impossible until they see it done and then it's, “oh wait, yeah that could be done.”

TK: Yeah I'd like to think there will be a lot of positive response from it. And generally the response I think traditionally depends on who you're talking to. In a lot of cases, engineers that have been in the industry a long time, they know if you're building something custom that you need to build something custom with it. When you're building a project that has a lot of specific requirements in it, trying to pull something general and make it perform to the characteristics that you need, typically takes longer than doing it the right way the first time. So I think if you ask a lot of experienced engineers they will say that this is probably very very obvious to them and why wouldn't you do it this way. Various marketing people or somebody else might have a different response especially if they work for a company that would like you to buy their technology. And if you work with a lot of people that have never actually built their own stuff before, a lot of times they only understand the works that they've worked in before. So it's, you know, in some cases when you're breaking new ground it's hard to get people's perspective to change a little bit in that regard. But I think we've gotten a tremendously positive response so far.

JB: Yeah that was actually one of the questions that I had when I first came here actually is “why build your own engine?” You know, historically Firaxis has used Gamebryo and has shipped many successful titles that way. Why go branch out and build a custom code base? And I think the answer is that there's at least as much engineering effort in either path. Your game is still your game. It's still unique and you're still going to need to spend time adapting what you have to what you need to do. And there's just so many things that become easier if you can build the entire thing the right way the first time.

ET: I’m Elizabeth Tobey, and we’ll be back next episode to discuss Civilization V’s user interface.

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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.

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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!”