The next is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Previous World. The sport, a historic 4X set in classical antiquity, launched on July 1, 2021, and is on the market for buy right here.
The expertise tree was one of many nice improvements of the unique Civilization, with out echoes in Empire or different proto-4X video games. (Apparently, the closest parallel might be the expertise card reductions within the Avalon Hill Civilization board sport, which Sid has at all times maintained was not an enormous affect on him. Bruce Shelley definitely would have been conversant in it, and a fantastic piece of Civ trivia is that the artist of the unique Avalon Hill expertise playing cards, launched a decade earlier than Sid’s Civilization, was none apart from Brian Reynold’s uncle!) The tech tree was an ideal little bit of sport design, particularly if the objective was readability. It was at all times abundantly clear the way to uncover Gunpowder when you wished to construct Musketeers.
In fact, every bit of sport design is a set of trade-offs, and one of many trade-offs that the standard tech tree made within the identify of readability was determinism. As everybody knew the trail to Gunpowder, it was very simple to recollect the precise order of the ten techs which led to Gunpowder in order that the participant might get to it as early as attainable. If this technique turned out to be optimum, then a veteran participant would discover themselves making the identical selections, sport after sport after sport. Certainly, many variations of Civ made this even simpler for the participant by permitting them to focus on a selected tech after which highlighting the correct selection every time it got here up.
In actual fact, Sid anticipated this downside from the start because the applied sciences offered to the participant in Civ 1 had been a random subset of those out there. Nevertheless, as a result of this model had no in-game UI and since the tech tree itself was so new, gamers didn’t give this randomness a lot thought, particularly when it was dropped quietly in later variations. Giving gamers a random subset of tech selections did clear up the essential downside however was maybe an inelegant manner of addressing it. The perfect resolution would drive gamers to make tough selections whereas additionally being clear about why the participant couldn’t select from all of the legitimate choices.
The reply got here from borrowing mechanics from deck-building board video games, first popularized by Dominion in 2008, which made shuffling, drawing, and discarding playing cards an necessary a part of gameplay. For Previous World, every tech can be represented by a card, and the participant would select a tech by taking 4 playing cards from the present draw pile, selecting one, and discarding the remaining. The discarded techs wouldn’t be seen by the participant once more till the subsequent time they’d be shuffled via the deck, guaranteeing tough selections. Deciding between Forestry and Labor Power turns into extra significant as a result of the expertise that you simply don’t decide won’t be out there till it passes via the discard pile, will get shuffled into the subsequent draw pile, and is ultimately drawn again into your hand, which might require researching 3 or 4 different techs first. The participant can observe the trail of every card via the completely different piles to know precisely when it would subsequent be out there and what the chances are of drawing it. Thus, there isn’t a longer a golden path via the tech tree, every particular person selection is extra significant due to discarding, and the entire system is totally clear to the participant.
As is usually the case with new sport techniques, making one change usually opens up new prospects that didn’t make sense beforehand. Turning techs into playing cards is an effective instance of this phenomenon as a result of as soon as we had the cardboard metaphor, we might shuffle different playing cards into the deck which had been NOT applied sciences however might nonetheless be unlocked the identical manner techs can be. Thus, we added “bonus” playing cards to our tech system, which might be researched identical to common techs however would supply a one-time bonus as an alternative, like a free Settler, a Nice Scientist, or a lift of Stone. The bonus playing cards would solely be out there as soon as for the participant, so they’d be, utilizing the terminology of deck-builders, trashed as an alternative of discarded as a result of we didn’t wish to clog up the deck with bonus playing cards for gamers who most well-liked to concentrate on simply customary applied sciences. These playing cards added a pleasant apples-to-oranges comparability for gamers to make – take the short-term bonus (a free archer proper now) or the long-term choice (unlock Lumbermills to supply Wooden to construct a number of Archers). Technique video games profit a fantastic deal from borrowing mechanical metaphors from bodily board video games – not solely do many gamers already deliver an understanding of the system with them however the bodily roots of the mechanics additionally make them inherently simpler to clarify on the interface.
