The technology tree was one of the great innovations of the original Civilization , without echoes in Empire or other proto-4X games. (Interestingly, the closest parallel is probably the technology card discounts in the Avalon Hill Civilization board game, which Sid has always maintained was not a big influence on him. Bruce Shelley certainly would have been familiar with it, and a great piece of Civ trivia is that the artist of the original Avalon Hill technology cards, released a decade before Sid’s Civilization , was none other than Brian Reynold’s uncle!) The tech tree was a perfect bit of game design, especially if the goal was clarity. It was always abundantly clear how to discover Gunpowder if you wanted to build Musketeers.
Of course, every piece of game design is a set of trade-offs, and one of the trade-offs that the traditional tech tree made in the name of clarity was determinism. As everyone knew the path to Gunpowder, it was very easy to remember the exact order of the ten techs which led to Gunpowder so that the player could get to it as early as possible. If this strategy turned out to be optimal, then a veteran player would find themselves making the same choices, game after game after game. Indeed, many versions of Civ made this even easier for the player by allowing them to target a specific tech and then highlighting the right choice each time it came up.
In fact, Sid anticipated this problem from the beginning as the technologies presented to the player in Civ 1 were a random subset of the ones available. However, because this version had no in-game UI and because the tech tree itself was so new, players didn’t give this randomness much thought, especially when it was dropped quietly in later versions. Giving players a random subset of tech choices did solve the basic problem but was perhaps an inelegant way of addressing it. The ideal solution would force players to make difficult choices while also being transparent about why the player couldn’t choose from all the valid options.
The answer came from borrowing mechanics from deck-building board games, first popularized by Dominion in 2008, which made shuffling, drawing, and discarding cards an important part of gameplay. For Old World , each tech would be represented by a card, and the player would choose a tech by taking four cards from the current draw pile, choosing one, and discarding the rest. The discarded techs would not be seen by the player again until the next time they would be shuffled through the deck, guaranteeing difficult decisions. Deciding between Forestry and Labor Force becomes more meaningful because the technology that you don’t pick will not be available until it passes through the discard pile, gets shuffled into the next draw pile, and is eventually drawn back into your hand, which could require researching 3 or 4 other techs first. The player can follow the path of each card through the different piles to know exactly when it might next be available and what the odds are of drawing it. Thus, there is no longer a golden path through the tech tree, each individual choice is more meaningful because of discarding, and the whole system is completely transparent to the player.
As is often the case with new game systems, making one change often opens up new possibilities that didn’t make sense beforehand. Turning techs into cards is a good example of this phenomenon because once we had the card metaphor, we could shuffle other cards into the deck which were NOT technologies but could still be unlocked the same way techs would be. Thus, we added “bonus” cards to our tech system, which could be researched just like regular techs but would provide a one-time bonus instead, like a free Settler, a Great Scientist, or a boost of Stone. The bonus cards would only be available once for the player, so they would be, using the terminology of deck-builders, trashed instead of discarded because we didn’t want to clog up the deck with bonus cards for players who preferred to focus on just standard technologies. These cards added a nice apples-to-oranges comparison for players to make - take the short-term bonus (a free archer right now) or the long-term option (unlock Lumbermills to produce Wood to build multiple Archers). Strategy games benefit a great deal from borrowing mechanical metaphors from physical board games - not only do many players already bring an understanding of the system with them but the physical roots of the mechanics also make them inherently easier to explain on the interface.
There are a few games that have made changes to the tech tree. MoO among the most notable and successful ones.
I find this to be an interesting approach. I’m not sure I’d want every game to do this, but it does provide a different feel, by removing any form of Golden Path type option. Not sure about the bonuses yet, but that’s because I haven’t played enough and have so far ignored them, the whole 1 times they’ve come up so far :)
Still I approve the whole card deck approach. Sometimes board games are the right source of inspiration.
I like that each tech only opens one or two options, so if you go too far up one tree, your deck doesn’t bloom to where bad draws make it too hard to obtain remedial techs from earlier in the tree.
+1. It also had the effect of making espionage and tech trades a little more meaningful. You could steal or exchange for a tech that you otherwise couldn’t develop. Creative trait FTW.
However, I largely played MOO and MOO2 in single player. I don’t really like much randomness in MP (this might be why Diplomacy is my favorite game of all time), unless there is so much of it that it just becomes noise that washes out in a short period of time.
Tech choices are too important and infrequent, especially in the early game, for randomness.
I have no opinion on MP in the context of a 4X, but on tech and randomness:
(Wow, this turned into a whole screed. Sorry not sorry for wall of text.)
Over time (thousands and thousands of hours in 4X games since the age of idk, 7?), I’ve become increasingly of the opinion that asymmetry and randomness are of first-order importance to the long-term enjoyability of any 4X game.
Look at it this way: the player is always going to become better at engaging with the systems – aka maximizing growth or production or w/e – than the AI will. Always. Unless the systems are so simple as to be not engaging, which, well, we’re not worried about those games. Given that player skill will always at some point grow beyond the AI’s ability to keep up, the designer has a few (non-exclusive) options to keep things interesting for the player:
Econ bonuses. Civ has done this forever. Easy enough. Might even be enough all by itself, honestly, if you can keep the player and the AIs on roughly the same development curve. This is still one of the best choices, honestly, even all this time after Empire.
Starting bonuses. Various Civs dabble in this; Old World leans hard on it. Broadly the same effect on the game as econ rate bonuses, but with useful differences in implementation when looking at growth curves and such. I believe this works reasonably well in Old World because the growth curves are much more linear than e.g. Civ’s highly exponential rates.
Get Tencent to write you a blank check to hire a dozen world-class AI engineers and give them two years to work on the AI after you’ve finalized your game design. All game studios should obviously pursue this option, but they don’t because they’ve lazy and/or incompetent.
I honestly don’t think there are many if any other meaningful options for the 4X designer. Given the constraints of the genre, where you by definition have the rush/boom/turtle triangle to contend with, I just don’t see what else you can do. Except! You can turn to other things to create more interesting gameplay opportunities – present players with Sid’s “meaningful choices.”
Like…
RandomnessI
Old World leans hard into this, where in Civ or Age of Wonders or whatever it’s mostly constrained to the map generator (and map generation is a whole topic, for sure! But anyway). This is I think where Old World really makes its money. Not only are you reacting to opponents, war outcomes, and whatever other things grow out of the “hard” systems’ interactions, but you’re constantly playing the hand you’re dealt in terms of heirs, events, marriages, injuries, deaths, etc. Keeps the player way more invested turn-to-turn than watching counters increment, gives real choices even when you’re in a period of peaceful development.
And it works here without being so immensely frustrating like it would be in Civ (and hell, sometimes is in e.g. BtS) because you’re not constantly fighting to climb the next step on the exponential growth ladder. Not that getting Ranges to get more Officers to juice your military production centers isn’t important, but the most meaningful techs in Old World don’t represent developmental milestones anywhere near what Industrialization or Gunpowder or Civil Service do in a game of Civ. So, by taking away the exponential growth option, players are freed to make decisions for all kinds of other reasons – it’s not darn-near wrong to choose anything but exponential growth unless the alternative is losing a war.
So as the designer, you can force players to play the hand they’re dealt rather than presenting a largely static optimization problem (or, I guess, presenting a largely static framework for local optimization problems to be systemically generated but anyway). And as a player, that ends up being (at least for me) much more fun long-term, because I’m forced to guess and lean into what I think might best accomplish both short- and long-term goals. Not to keep picking on Civ, but the problem there almost always boils down to “boom until I get a temporary technological or tactical advantage, then fight the shortest war possible to get the most efficient gains possible, repeat.” That’s still a thing in Old World, for sure, but I’ve found myself making decisions on a bunch of different axes that just don’t exist in other 4X games, and that’s fantastic.
Aaaaanyway Old World is great and I hope it is a grand success for Mohawk.
I couldn’t agree more about the randomness. It can be annoying as hell when the turbo-charged heir one has carefully groomed suddenly snuffs it just when the leader is about to expire, but the need to make adjustments to long-term plans helps to prevent the game from getting stale IMO. And of course much (most?) of the randomness is beneficial to the player in some way. I’ve played strategy games before where I’ve disliked the random events intensely, because they feel artificially tacked on. In OW the randomness is so thoroughly integrated into the fabric of the game that it feels natural and makes the decision-making process more interesting.
Very good post. I have to say I really didn’t think that much about the importance of randomize in 4x games. But now having dabble in Humankind, which has very little randomness, I see how much a difference it is going to make in the long-term replayability.
In Humankind, your Civ choice are sort of random, but the tech tree isn’t. Even never having played the game before it was obvious to me I wanted to grow people and then grown industry in order to get on exponential bandwagon. So techs that help increase, influence and money are less important. Not sure how science exactly fits in yet.
In contrast OW present some interesting choices. I really need X, maybe I should just take a short tech now, in hopes of getting in soon, or I do a take my 2nd or 3rd tech choice now, cause I know I’ll want them soon enough.
But after OW, the Mankind tech tree already seems bland despite it covering 5000+ years.
Old World has a lot of different currencies (referred to in-game as “yields”), which represent things very concrete (Iron), somewhat vague (Orders), and VERY abstract (Civics). All of these yields are produced differently, are used for different purposes, and are stored (or not) in a few different ways. There are 13 distinct yields in Old World , a lot more than in most 4X games (although perhaps coincidentally equal to the exact number of resources in Offworld Trading Company ). Indeed, the game used to have three more – Horses, Happiness, and Inspiration – so clearly we weren’t afraid of multiple currencies! Why so many?
To start, we needed some new yields because we adopted resource stockpiles, which are a transparent way to differentiate unit and improvement production. We believe strategy games are most fun when the player is adapting their play to the map, and having a variety of yields produced from rural improvements (in our class, the classic Age of Empires quartet of Food, Iron, Stone, and Wood) gives players lots of reasons to adapt their plans. Maybe a player normally trains Archers by spending Wood but starts one game a long distance from any forests, so adapting to a new strategy would be best. Further, just as Orders make each move more interesting, giving a yield stockpile cost to actions that were free before, like building a Temple with Stone or training a Swordsman with Iron, makes them also more interesting, giving the player a reason to choose different options depending on the current situation.
In contrast, Civ has relied on a much more abstract model that shifts around from game to game. In Civs 1 & 2 , resources like Iron and Stone were turned into generic “production” which just determines how fast anything can be built. Civs 3 & 4 made resources national booleans which turned certain units on or off (no Chariots without Horses). Civs 5 & 6 went further by allowing only X units per resource. (Only Gathering Storm added a true stockpile.) These systems avoided a stockpile model because it felt too awkward in a game about all of world history. Old World can get away with just Food, Iron, Stone, and Wood because they will all be relevant throughout the game. Civ needs to make Iron and Copper and Horses matter but also Saltpeter and Oil and Rubber. Keeping the list from exploding (and minimizing obsolete entries) was certainly a fear I had as a designer.
However, for Old World , the question arises of what should happen if the player has an empty stockpile. If they only have Stone and nothing else, have we taken away the player’s agency by limiting them to a fraction of their build choices? The solution was adopting the free market system from Offworld Trading Company , which gives players the flexibility to buy and sell their stockpiles as needed although often at the cost of inefficiency. Indeed, the system is much closer to the market of Age of Empires , which always maintained a buy price twice as high as the sell price to represent this inefficiency. Collapsing these two prices into one was a key moment in the design of Offworld that made the game so fluid, but the priority in Old World was making market an option only when necessary, so we discouraged its overuse with separate buy and sell prices. Once the market system prevented the game from stalling out, stockpiles could become the core of the economy, so that almost everything would cost something, from 20 Wood for a Farm to 1800 Stone for The Hagia Sophia. (An important exception was Workers, who have no cost, so that a downward spiraling economy could still be saved by switching to producing Workers who can even harvest outside of their territory.)
The next question about yields was what cities should produce themselves. Some yields didn’t need huge revisions (Science, Money, and Maintenance still work like they mostly always have), but others required more work. Culture started out exactly as it had been since Civ 3 by determining how fast borders would grow. This mechanic was eventually dropped to make border growth completely driven by player actions, and a new one replaced it as the primary role of Culture. I’ve often found that players enjoy discrete, chunky levels more than bars that fill up indefinitely, so I defined four successive Culture levels that a city would go through – Weak, Developing, Strong, and Legendary – with each requiring significantly more Culture to attain than the last. The next step was to attach effects to these different levels so that Culture would matter. A simple one was assigning more Victory Points to higher levels of Culture, which was a great way to show that a small highly cultured nation could be as valuable as a large uncultured one. Making all types of production hurrying require Developing Culture was an effective way to differentiate newly founded cities from your cultured core.
I also gave each Wonder a specific Culture prerequisite (for example, The Pantheon requires Legendary Culture), which creates an orthogonal way to progress outside of the tech tree. I had never liked having Wonders on the tech tree – they clog up the nodes with unlocks that are definitely less valuable than a new unit or improvement. Taking them off the tree also allowed a random subset of Wonders to be available each game, a great feature if we ever double the number of Wonders but don’t want to overwhelm the player. Seeing how well Culture worked for Wonders inspired us to try the same thing with most of the urban improvements, so that while you may only need Citizenship to unlock Courthouses, you will need a Strong city for a Ministry, and a Legendary city for a Palace. This hybrid approach allowed us to add new improvements to the game without having to add a bunch of new techs which would just unlock better versions of an improvement you already had. Attaching unique units to higher-level improvements also got these units off of the tech tree and onto this orthogonal path. A cultured Greece could build Hoplites without ever unlocking Spearmen as a completely alternate path through the game.
Discontent, on the other hand, was a necessary evil that I often had to remind myself was actually necessary as no one ever said that the best part of Old World is the Discontent. Ultimately, the game needs some way to push back on the player to keep positive feedback loops from snowballing too much. (Maintenance, unit consumption, and law upkeep all exist to keep inflation in check, for example.) Further, the era would not feel right without some sense of anger at the ruler; simply put, the bread-and-circuses need a reason to exist. The event system would be a lot harder to write without options to either please or upset the people.
However, I wanted to be careful to avoid one dynamic I’ve seen over and over with other 4X games; I didn’t want Discontent to just be an inevitable side effect of Growth, of larger cities and more citizens. Thus, Discontent is largely disconnected from how fast your cities grow, so players are not tempted to manipulate their Growth to keep their cities happy. Hurrying production with citizens would no longer be a bizarre path to making people happier. Finally, just like Culture, Discontent levels up each time the bar fills, with each level having a higher set of negative modifiers, each step a powerful motivator. I might let my leader become Cowardly to placate a mob, especially if Discontent drops a level or two.
I also wanted to differentiate cities more by splitting “production” into Growth, Civics, and Training. Growth is functionally similar to Food in previous Civs as it determines the rate a City produces new citizens (although it is also the production yield for civilian units like Settlers and Scouts). Civics and Training, however, come from splitting the old production/shields/hammers of Civ into two different yields – Training, which is used for military units, and Civics, which is used for specialists (upgraded citizens attached to tile improvements) and projects (akin to city-based improvements in Civ ). By making city Growth separate from the global Food stockpile and differentiating Training and Civics, we enabled more options for city specialization, making military powerhouse cities specializing in Training more distinct from those able to crank out the Settlers with Growth.
To make this system work, of course, we would need many ways to focus on one yield over another, ideally based on adapting to the map. Thus, Growth comes from Farmer specialists, Training from Miners, and Civics from Stonecutters, so cities which specialize in various improvements (which the game encourages via adjacency bonuses and governor traits) will naturally end up specializing in one of these three yields. Many of the Families also add a significant amount of Growth, Training, or Civics to their cities as do the Discipline, Courage, and Charisma ratings of the governors.
As the stockpile of physical yields was successful and being inspired by the stockpiling of Science and Culture in Through the Ages , I decided to stockpile Civics and Training as well, which answered the question of what should happen with a city’s yields when not being used for production. Unused Growth went into making more citizens, so it felt strange that unused Civics and Training would just disappear. I didn’t necessarily know what the Training and Civics would be used for but was confident that we would figure something out along the way. Some uses were pretty obvious, such as laws and theologies for Civics and unit promotions and upgrades for Training, but other uses became clear when we needed to solve other problems. Wonders felt more grand, more of an accomplishment, once they required Civics, a yield which could NOT be bought on the open market. Training became the limitation making Force March a powerful tool but also one which could only be used occasionally. Tying governors and generals to Civics and Training solved the problem of how often we should prompt the player to fill an empty slot; because of the cost, adding one wasn’t an automatic decision that players would be frustrated to miss. Both yields were also useful for differentiating mission costs – asking Persia for a truce would cost Civics while asking the Gauls would cost Training.
Finally, our event system became quite powerful over the course of development, and the number of currencies gave us the knobs necessary to write 3,000 distinct events. Maybe the player would choose between Money and Training, between Stone and Science, between Growth and Orders, or between Culture and Discontent. These choices could even be between nations – send Carthage X Science per turn if they send back Y Training in return. From the code’s perspective, these yields are simply different flavors of the same thing (each one is just a separate entry in yield.xml), but they feel like a choice between apples and oranges, which is ideal because that forces players to make decisions with their gut instead of with their calculator.
Great read, Soren. Old World has some seriously sexy resource management, and it’s fascinating to hear how it came into being. So many brilliant touches, like…
Okay, to test myself…
…let me see if I can do this off the top of my head. 1) Money, 2) food, 3) stone, 4) iron, 5) wood, 6) orders, 7) training, 8) civics, 9) research, 10) influence, 11) growth.
Hmm, I’m stymied on the last two. Does discontent count? Experience?
Assuming you meant culture by “influence”, you’re missing Discontent and Maintenance. I’ve petitioned Soren a couple of times to remove Maintenance as a yield and replace it with money penalties - Maintenance is IMO much more “hidden” than the others - but there’s no really good solution, other than Maintenance, that would allow certain cities to be a monetary net drain.
Wait, influence is called culture? Yikes, I’ve been thinking of it as culture all along, but for some reason forcing myself to call it influence! I have no idea where I got that, but now I need to go revise all my hand-written players aids. Gah.
Can you elaborate on this? Maintenance is a money penalty! Or do you just mean folding it into all the other money tallies instead of treating it as a separate entity?
Personally, I like that it’s got its own “knob”. I kind of like being able to compartmentalize it. But I haven’t given it nearly as much thought as you guys.
It needs to be separate so that there can be modifiers that JUST affect money and JUST affect maintenance. (There’s a more boring reason too, but I forget it.)
Maintenance functionally works like a money penalty, but it’s a separate yield, so we can have effects that only change maintenance (Apadana), and it’s possible to have net-negative money.
A simpler system would be to have actual money penalties tied to things like discontent, but that means you can’t have negative money generation. In the worst case you’d have a city that generates 0 money and so the penalty doesn’t matter. Maintenance being a separate thing means a city can generate 0 money, have 10 maintenance and thus give a net loss of 10 money.
That’s convincing enough - I think one of the great things about Civ4 was that it allowed cities to be a net cost, so I’m glad OW does this as well. Still, Maintenance is the odd one out when it comes to yields. It’s the only negative yield, and it doesn’t do anything on its own, rather it decreases the production of another yield.
It’s cool to see boardgames inspiring PC game design. There’s been a lot of cool ideas in the boardgame world so it is nice to see it come spice up the strategy games on PC.
I particularly like the way training and civics accumulation work, forcing the player into some balancing decisions. If I am on a war footing and start building military units in most of my cities, I will immediately see a big drop in ‘national’ training accumulation, which can have a significant impact on my ability to hand out promotions, appoint generals, order force marches and the like. Likewise, going on a project or specialist spree might prevent me from passing an urgent law, starting a diplomatic mission etc. I like the way it all interlocks, which is true of the game design in general. Makes for very absorbing gameplay.
The first Civilization game was like a game design thunderbolt, sent from the heavens and marking everything it touched. Although the game does have antecedents, it is not unreasonable to split a history of digital strategy games into those made before Civ and those made afterwards. Working to extend the franchise across multiple games was an intimidating task because the original cast such a large shadow. “Whatever I do,” thought many a Civ designer, including myself, “I better not screw this thing up!” It took many iterations of the game before designers realized that there wasn’t a single magic number or formula inside the game without which the whole thing would unravel. Indeed, the basic thematic gameplay of Civ has been remarkably resilient across six major iterations with countless interesting detours, cul-de-sacs, and dead ends. Almost every aspect of the original has been taken apart and put back together again, and the franchise keeps on ticking, easily the longest-thriving strategy franchise of all time.
With that preamble done and due praise given, it is all the more remarkable that one bad game mechanic has been preserved from version to version, tweaked perhaps, adjusted at times, but still as clumsy, fiddly, and unnecessary in 2021 as it was in 1991 - the system of placing citizens on tiles. In Civilization, each tile inside a city’s territory is completely useless without placing a citizen on that tile. This is not a particularly interesting or engaging choice - it is usually obvious which tiles are optimal, and the player can at best get maybe a little extra growth or production or money if they spend some time micromanaging the tiles. Indeed, “micromanaging” is perhaps too generous a term - tweaking or fiddling or even futzing with them is more accurate. There is no in-game cost to moving each citizen in each of your cities every turn to eek out a tiny 1% efficiency gain; the only cost is the player’s time and patience. Within the overall design, citizen management is completely unrivaled for the least amount of benefit for the most amount of time spent (which is a simple shorthand for being the least amount of fun).
One can tell that Civ’s designers have never been enthralled with the system. Even in the original, the citizen system is buried deep away within the opaque and intimidating city screen. (A fellow Civ developer once quipped to me that the best feature of the original city screen is that it disappeared almost anywhere you clicked on it.) One could finish (and win) an entire game of Civ without ever engaging with or even understanding it. In later versions, the designers encouraged the player to use the city governors to set “priorities” that determined how the AI would place the citizens for you - a telltale sign of poor game design is the inevitable addition of an AI to play the game for you.
Furthermore, if the system was bad for casual players, it was actually worse for the hardcore. By Civ 3, veterans had mastered the art of rearranging citizens each turn to avoid wasting a drop of growth or production. If a Warrior cost 10 hammers, and a city produced 7 hammers a turn, then 4 hammers would get wasted every turn the city produced a Warrior (because 7 + 7 = 14, and the 4 extra hammers were thrown away). Thus, the optimal player would remember to visit their city every turn to switch the citizens around to alternate between 7 hammers and 3 hammers with more growth or money. Civ 4’s citizen management code minimized this type of micromanagement; instead of throwing away the extra hammers, the game applied them to the next item being produced. Of course, new forms of micromanagement sprung up in different places, all in the service of a system which had never delivered much enjoyment in the first place.
I was already not a fan of citizens by the time of Civ 4, and the earliest members of the Frankenstein testing group may remember an odd version of the game where there was no citizen placement. Instead, cities got yields from all tiles within their borders and higher yields still if the tiles had improvements like Mines and Farms. The change removed the awkwardness of citizen placement, but it couldn’t work without other major changes to the game. The rest of Civ’s basic plumbing (how cities grow, how units are produced, where money comes from, etc.) was built to work with the citizen system, and so it could not just be removed without causing the rest of the game to break. At a minimum, Civ 4 would need a resource stockpile system so that, for example, cities full of mines would send all the excess output to an iron stockpile instead of spitting out a new unit each turn.
However, designing Old World meant that I definitely would get a chance to build the system from scratch - this time without putting citizens on tiles! Because rural improvements like farms and mines always contributed to the national stockpile, I didn’t need to worry about a city that was overloaded with a specific type of improvement. I just needed to make sure the improvements couldn’t be built so quickly that the math became exponential. The Orders system helped out here in multiple ways. First, although players could perhaps build a ton of Workers to mass produce improvements, they might not have the Orders necessary to keep them all working, especially if wars flare up, either with tribes or other nations. Further, because the number of moves in an average turn of Old World is more consistent than in Civ (with more Orders than units early and less Orders than units later), the game has less early “dead” turns with little activity. Thus, the total number of turns in a game of Old World is much fewer than in a game of Civ, making exponential math much less dangerous. Finally, although we experimented with having cities produce improvements directly on the map, we found that tying them to Workers, which build them by spending one Order a turn over multiple turns, both made guns-or-butter work and also delayed improvement construction enough to prevent a runaway economy.
On the other hand, one original piece of logic behind citizen tile placement was that it required cities to maintain a balance between improvements and growth - building more improvements than citizens had no value because no one was there to work the new Mines and Farms. This part of the system had merit to it; balancing multiple vectors that limit each other is solid game design. I felt we could recreate this dynamic without the fussiness of citizen management by allowing cities to upgrade citizens into permanent specialists for an improvement that exists on a specific tile. We would maintain the basic idea behind citizen tile placement (put an unused citizen onto a specific tile) but as a permanent decision with a one-time cost. In other words, the player makes an intentional choice to boost a tile’s output with a citizen, but because the choice is not reversible, the micromanagement is now gone.
The tricky part was determining how MUCH a specialist should boost an improvement. Initially, I thought that we should largely duplicate the basic economy of Civ, so that an empty improvement would barely produce anything, but it was hard to get the game to scale well that way. The player would start with so little production early on that we had to lower the costs of everything, which became a big problem later on when players turned the corner and started producing far more than they could spend. The system would only work with inflating prices, which would add a heavy dose of black box complexity.
Instead, we increased base improvement production and reduced the boost from specialists to either 50% or 100%. This change got the math right for empty improvements but now specialists were no longer worth the investment (when compared with just adding new improvements). We added a little Science output to each specialist (which is a very good thematic match) and added a Maintenance cost to any improvement without a specialist (which helps control inflation and was also good thematically), but it still wasn’t quite enough to make specialists worth producing.
I used this opportunity to fix a couple other problems with the design. Players had complained that cities were too similar to each other, which was certainly a problem with yields coming less from the terrain itself, as with Civ. Thus, we attached four important city yields to each of the four core rural specialists - Farmers would produce Growth, Miners produce Training, Stonecutters produce Civics, and Woodcutters produce Science. (Cutting down trees produces Science because of, um, paper? Not all at because I had an extra yield in search of an extra specialist.) Now, cities would be differentiated by their specialists which were a result of their improvements which would largely be determined by their terrain, getting us back to how terrain leads to city specialization in Civ. It took some time to isolate the positive features of citizen placement and then port them back into Old World, but it’s nice to know that maybe citizens did serve a purpose back in 1991 after all.
