portve.blogg.se

We wanted the culture victory to be a lot more like Rome.

We want to move culture away from filling in trees towards creating signature elements that make your culture unique from anyone else's. "What we want for each victory is different things you build up and different things you excel at during the game, but what we also want is for each four forms of victory to encourage you to interact with the other powers. "We felt that not only was that not reflective of the civilisation that is actually culturally the greatest, but it isn't a very interesting play style." Beach laughs. It was the perfect strategy for isolationists. You never wanted to have more than three or four cities because the cost of new policies would go up too much.

"What we found is that there were incentives in this old cultural victory system to keep your civilisation small. "The way the culture victory used to work is that there have always been social policies - 10 different trees - and the goal was to complete five social policy trees and spend a few turns building the Utopia Project to win a victory," Beach explains. Ed Beach, formerly of NASA and a man who's created the absolute best strategy card game about the Reformation, doesn't necessarily disagree with that - and a large part of the focus of his team's latest project, the Civ 5 expansion Brave New World, lies with sorting it out. Okay, that analogy has fallen apart somewhat - but so, you could argue, has the Civilization series' previous attempts at designing meaningful and truly satisfying cultural victories. Termites that come bearing flat whites and frappucinos.

Termites that write the popular hits and star in the popular films as they munch through your rival's territory. If all-out warfare's like going to your neighbour's house, ringing the doorbell and then smacking them about the face with a snow shovel, cultural imperialism is a little sneakier - it's more akin to dropping a load of termites over the back fence under the cover of night. Hit them with Shakespeare, though - or with Starbucks - and you've dealt your enemy a blow that's much harder to shake off. You can bomb people into oblivion, but they often just come back from oblivion fuming about it. Cultural victories are the ones that tend to stick.