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AusGamers: You're here with AusGamers once again, we're out at San Francisco's 2K office speaking with Garrett Bittner who's the producer for Civilization V. We've been playing a bit of the game and it's pretty damn good, Garrett let's jump straight into the main changes from Civ IV to Civ V; obviously the series always has incremental changes with each iteration but this one definitely seems like more of a leap forward...

Garrett Bittner: Yeah definitely, we've certainly tried to provide a very different experience with Civilization V, but at the same time an experience that felt uniquely like a Civilization title. Some of the big changes we've made are we've moved away from a square tile-based system to a hex-based system. And so what that's allowed us to do is create this really natural, organic flowing terrain an in addition it makes the gameplay a lot more clear; you don't have situations where movement along diagonals costs less than movement in the cardinal direction.

Along with that we've removed stacks - since the beginning of Civilzation you could take any number of units and stack them onto one tile and move them across the terrain in a ‘stack of doom'... that's no longer possible, no you have to spread your units across the terrain, but what it's really done and what we're most excited about in Civilization V is it really brought a tactical element to combat; now you have to be aware of positioning and terrain and all that sort of stuff, and it really just provides an interesting backdrop for combat [in Civilzation V].



Some of the other things we've done is introduce City States, and those are small NPCs that never grown beyond one city, they never really want to win the game, but they're there to really grease the wheels of diplomacy; to provide as a fulcrum for diplomatic action between the major players in the game. So you can befriend a civilisation, they'll give you resources and become a really, really powerful contribution to your empire, but at the same time they're vulnerable; they may be attacked by another civilisation, and then you have these interesting decisions you need to make - do I go to the defence of my City State and risk going to war with another [more powerful] civilisation or do I try to modify my strategy in other places?

We've also spent a lot of work on the diplomacy in general in Civilization V. We really wanted to make each leader have unique and distinct flavour; we want it to feel like you're playing against a friend. You know how the friend wants to win the game, you know they have particular strategies and in spite of that, our AI is still intelligent, so if you defeat what they want to do, they may be able to adapt and go after you with different strategies.

AG: So with the new combat elements and getting rid of the stacking - did that come about as a result of multiplayer? Did you see guys stacking and making for unfair match-making - taking advantage of the game? Or was it just an evolution of the old system?

Garrett: I think it was more of an evolution. Certainly multiplayer and how people play multiplayer is a part of it, but I think in general how people play single-player and multiplayer is a big part of our decision to move away from stacked combat because what we saw in previous Civilizations and something we really wanted to evolve upon was the fact that all your combat happened in cities. You'd take all your units and stack them in a city to prevent someone else with a larger stack coming in and just capturing your city. So all the combat in every Civilization game is focused around the cities and what we wanted to do is draw that combat out into the landscape and into the terrain, and make it so much more interesting; giving you the option to experience combat in unique and memorable ways. So now you have the option to defend a mountain pass with a small number of units against an overwhelming force, you have the option to, if your intelligent in how you use your units, stand out against an aggressive opponent who has a larger army.

These memorable, tactical experiences are now available in Civilization V, when they may not have been available in previous Civilization titles. We just really wanted to deepen the combat and bring it out into the environment.



AG: In the short amount of time I've played, having the cities being able to fight back and stand their ground, even in the event of having to build units in another city to come to the attacked city's aid, immediately changed the combat system for me - I just had more micro-management options to deal with that sort of thing...

Garrett: I think in general a couple of things we've added on top of the one-unit-per-tile change has made combat deeper. Ranged units and having cities defend themselves, you know, having cities defend themselves grew naturally out of the fact you could only put one unit in your city anymore and if they didn't defend themselves they'd just be easy targets; you know, you could just take any two units at random and march them up and grab any city that you wanted to. So we needed to make cities feel much more defensible and much more of an accomplishment when you actually captured a city. Now what you have in Civilization V is sieges of cities feel really epic - it's not an easy thing to capture a city. You need to coordinate and bring a smart army forward on a city before you can capture it.

The other thing that also naturally grew out of the one-unit-per-tile change has been ranged combat. So now you have ranged units that can fire over your front lines from a couple tiles away and hit your enemies, and it really provides this interesting dynamic between melee units and ranged units; you can have a front line of melee units and rear line of ranged units who're softening up your enemies before you're moving in with your cavalry, for example. It's an interesting dynamic.

AG: Now obviously Civ isn't all about combat, there's a lot of diplomacy and even options to build your empire without ever being in any combat - what's changed in this regard? I've noticed that a lot of the technology advancements are more organic this time around, and things like the Foreign Policy adoption system are intricate, you know, deep, but still streamlined...

Garrett: One thing that we really wanted to do with the policy system and is something we've introduced in Civ V, was take a really great system that was in Civ IV, the Civic System, and take it to the next level. So what you had in Civ IV was these civics that provided you with unique and interesting and powerful bonuses, and you could pick, you know, five of them at a time from among the list, but what we've done with Civilization V is we have what's called "Policy Trees" and a policy tree, you can build your empire and manage your empire in a very organic way. You can tailor your policies towards your particular play-style and these are permanent choices that live with you throughout the game, so you can really build a unique government that suits your own civilisation and it gives you that much more power to tailor your play-style and tailor how your empire is run.



As far as the other ways to win the game, we have four victories in Civilization V; we have Domination which is capturing all the capitols in the game, we also have Science, Diplomacy and a Cultural victory, and all of these victories are going to feel very similar to previous Civilization titles, for example the Diplomacy victory is the same as it was in Civilization IV; you have to build the United Nations and then have a vote for who is the king of the world, more or less, and that person wins the game. But what's interesting is in Civilization V, the City States have a vote now in the UN election and so that really deepens the diplomatic interactions you have, because you have to worry about the major powers but you also have to worry about these City States that are all over the map and you have to be friends with a large number of them if you want to win the Diplomatic game...

AG: So how dynamic is that? Obviously it's about how you've treated them throughout the game, but is it cut and dry, or deeper than that?

Garrett: It's cut and dry. They will vote for you or not, but the way they make that decision can be very complicated because there are a lot of things that feed into that. You have influence points that you can build up with each of these nations, and that will determine your standing with those City States. For example, if you have more influence points than any other nation with a particular City State, that State will be your ally and they will vote for you in the United Nations election. But you also have other things you can do that are very interesting, say for example that a larger civilisation takes over a City State, you can move in and you can liberate that City State and they will be grateful for you forever and so they're probably going to vote for you in the election if you do something like that. So you have a lot of really interesting decisions you can make.

AG: With the Leaders, you mentioned to me earlier that each of them has their own personality based on their personality in history, obviously you adopt a Leader when you play the game - how much of their personality comes in to effect into how you're perceived in the game?



Garrett: Quite a bit of it actually because each civilisation has its own unique traits and abilities, and they're really tailored towards the historical relevance of those civilisations. For example, Gahndi has an ability that allows him to grow faster in a smaller civilisation so they'll have, naturally, a smaller number of cities that are actually larger. Napoleon has a culture benefit... and not only does each civilisation feel unique as you play against them, they feel unique as you play with them. I think it's very, very interesting.

AG: Given you've built an all-new engine for this game, and this might seem like an off-key question, but I've always played Civ on PC, but really loved playing Civ Rev on console - with Kinect and Move now, surely there's an opportunity there to bring the more hardcore version of Civ to the consoles... is that something you guys have thought about?

Garrett: Nothing we've thought about at this time. But we're always interested, and we are always interested in bringing the Civ experience to as many people as possible and I think that's why recently you've seen things like Civilization on consoles, the iPad and iPhone - very soon you'll see it on Facebook. So once we're done with Civilization V, it's very possible that we may look at these new experiences; these new controls and interfaces and say "how can we bring Civilization to these things?", and I think there're a lot of opportunities there.

AG: Steam has moved into Mac territories and you just mentioned iPad and iPhone, also my housemate is a Mac user and is desperate for both this game to come to Mac and for us to be able to play against each other - is the game coming to Mac at all?

Garrett: We can't announce anything at this time, but every other Civilization title has been on the Mac, so... unfortunately that's all I can say.

AG: Okay that's fine, thanks heaps for that Garrett.