Solver:	Let us speak more about CivIV. It's quite obvious you are very excited about map scripts from all this talking, but what else do you believe makes CivIV better than previous games and, in particular, CivIII?
Sirian:	The "15-fer" trade deal I mentioned, summer 2002. [Pre-trade] Five techs from the middle ages and ten from the industrial era. I won this game by Diplomacy in 750AD! On Deity! This was one of the early R[ealms] B[eyond] Civ tourney games, and a month or two later, the last patch for CivIII came out, in which Soren fixed the unbalanced tech pace on higher difficulty. You can't duplicate the 750AD diplomatic win on today's versions of CivIII. Not without modding! The early game is the real prize. Soren made some design choices that are nothing short of spectacular, in my view. Having to research to gain access to worker actions is a concept that was initiated in [the] CivIII Conquests expansion. Soren made the decision to focus on that, to build on it in CivIV. The result leaves us with a dozen or more types of worker actions, scattered around the early game tech tree. Your early research paths are now impacted by the types of resources near you when you start. For instance, if you have Wines nearby, you will need to research your way to Monarchy before you can build a winery on the plot and collect the resource. You have to go up the Religion and Civics branch of the ancient era tech tree to get to Monarchy, so this may influence you to chase early religions. If you found a religion, or more than one, you'll be playing a vastly different game than if you did not. Likewise, early access to Hereditary Rule civic may change your needs and priorities. You may build extra military units, because they allow your cities to grow larger. If you have Gems nearby, but they are in a jungle plot, you have to have Iron Working to chop down the jungle before you can mine. This may lead you to take an entirely different path through the tech tree! You need Mining, Bronze Working, and Iron Working. These will reveal where Copper and Iron sources are, and this may occur earlier in the game than if you were trying to collect Wines instead of Gems. You may put a city in a different location, because Copper was revealed to be there. Once you mine the copper, that mine will produce a lot of shields for you. Maybe the extra shields allow you to build and complete an ancient Wonder of the World! These are completely different strategic paths, and they are but two of many. Which one is right for you in a particular game? What is the next priority? There is a lot more strategic depth to CivIV because of subtle things like this. Better yet, we have been testing and balancing all of these options for a year and a half now. So while no game balance can be perfect, the balance here is better than players have any right to expect! CivIV will be the most replayable Civ game ever, of that you may be certain.
Solver:	In CivIII, one of my main complaints was the poor late game. You'd have to manage hundreds of Workers, the space race was over very early in the Modern Age, and the late game generally did feel dull to many players. How would you comment on the CivIV late game?
Sirian:	The "15-fer" trade deal I mentioned, summer 2002. [Post-trade] Five techs from the middle ages and ten from the industrial era. I won this game by Diplomacy in 750AD! On Deity! This was one of the early R[ealms] B[eyond] Civ tourney games, and a month or two later, the last patch for CivIII came out, in which Soren fixed the unbalanced tech pace on higher difficulty. You can't duplicate the 750AD diplomatic win on today's versions of CivIII. Not without modding! The CivIII late game (at least in single player) was a casualty of the AI. The AIs would reach Nationalism, engage Mutual Protection Pacts, and devolve in to crippling wars. First Communism, then after expansions, Facism, were government types the AI would be forced to enter, thanks to war weariness from all the fighting, and they would wither away in there and die. A fun late game must be a competitive late game. Above all, the AI has to run the entire race. It is not good enough to collapse halfway through, or even to collapse in the final leg of the race. Another problem was tech trading. In CivIII, you could crawl up out of some of the deepest holes just by leveraging one tech trade in to several extra techs. I called this "N-fer" trading. Obtain one tech and turn it in to a 2fer. Or set up a sequence of deals. A 3fer, 4fer... The biggest round of trading I ever had was a 15-fer. That's just ridiculous! Since it is not in the interests of the AI to let the human player pull these kinds of deals over and over, we concentrated on teaching the AI to be stingy with the tech trades. This includes AI-AI trading, not just human-AI trading. So in CivIV, all the way through the game, conducting your own research remains vital. This means that even in to the late game, there are many paths from which to choose. The AIs fight fewer wars, and they will no longer agree to ally against anybody. They tend not to turn on their friends any more, so it is harder to instigate trouble. In CivIII, the AI would fight as an inevitability. All the civs and all the leaders were warmongers. It was possible for a game to be peaceful, but any spark would blow the entire powder keg, more or less ensuring permanent warfare from there on. With tech trading slowed, with self-research restored to the level of importance it held in CivI and CivII, with AIs who will not automatically waste their resources on pointless wars just [to] be fighting somebody, CivIV has a much more competitive late game strategic situation. Fewer workers, no pollution to clean up, fewer, more powerful, more costly military units... These little touches help significantly, no doubt about that, but most important is that the game isn't over yet. That's what really makes the difference. In CivIII, once the AIs are all tied up in knots in the industrial era, the human player can just sneak past them. They are like a bunch of hares sleeping by the side of the road. They could have won the race, but they stopped competing. The space race now takes longer to complete in CivIV. This is one of the areas where the testers had a big impact. Soren started out having CivIV's space race just like CivIII's: fast and dirty. We ended up in a place more like CivI and CivII: you have to research almost the entire tech tree, and building the spaceship takes significant effort. Remember what I said earlier about the AI's love of cottages and windmills? Well, this tends to mean their cities are stronger on commerce but weaker on production. So CivIV's space can be quite thrilling. The AIs tend to be stronger than the human on research (at least if you are playing at a difficulty level appropriate to your skills and experience level). Yet they take longer to build the parts, because they focus less. Even if you are trailing on tech, you may still be in the game! If your attention is on trying to win, because the game is still competitive... well, I find that a lot more engaging than CivIII's late game. Immortal difficulty is the second-highest setting, and I won my last Archipelago test game on Immoral by building a compelling navy and air force, [with] enough ground forces to attack, and wiped out my biggest rival when he was down to the last spaceship part. That was pretty exciting, let me tell you! It was such a close call! I then had to decide whether to keep attacking – to strike at my next closest rival while I had the military momentum – or to try to shift gears and complete the spaceship myself.

PAGE 1 | PAGE 2 | PAGE 3