At The Gates: Jon Shafer's new strategy game

It should, as Foundation is essentially a science fiction retelling of the fall of the Roman Empire.

(New Trantor = Ravenna)

Exactly! Also similar to the original Battletech setting.

We can also add Emperor of the Fading Sun, the aborted Simtex Metal Lords title, and I'm sure a few others that are based off the Fall of Rome:)

I even have my own ideas for a strategy game taking place in the equivalent of circa 400-800 - if I can ever get my hands on a strategy game engine I can mod to enter in the gameplay twists I need to fit the setting (un-tech tree, managed obsolescence instead of expansion, spreading zones of darkness, etc).

I think there's a bit of a different parallel between this and the Battletech stuff, where in Battletech it's all Lostech and it's not a matter of a gradual decline in progress but rather of a decline having happened.

This was the main problem I had with GalCiv. That's all that technology did: increase certain numbers, usually by a percentage. It was incredibly dry & uninteresting. Yes it had important gameplay effects, and your success depended on wisely choosing which techs to research next. But there wasn't anything that fundamentally affected gameplay. Compare that with all the ridiculous & nifty stuff you could eventually do in MOO2: blow up planets, completely terraform planets to damn near whatever you wanted, (eventually) gain radically new abilities for your ships in combat, and on, and on, and on.

My problem with complexity and micromanagement is when it needs to be repeated.

That why MOO 1 was so good. There was actually quite alot of detail and complexity at the empire level in MOO1: Technology, Spying, Politics, Fleet Design. But you made those decisions once and they effected your entire empire. At the planetary level you made much quicker decisions that could be either executed from the galaxy map. So you spent the entire game thinking like an Emperor instead of an overworked city planner. Compare to MOO2 or Civ in the midgame: Switch to city 1, check the health and growth, tweak the build order, switch to city 2... and on and on. Thats when micromanagement becomes tedious, when you have to repeat it over-and-over.

Thats a challenge Jon will have to face with At the Gates. Best case: the changing map creates a dynamic, constantly changing strategic challenge that you need to think about with a wide lens. Worst Case: The changing map just adds extra complexity and slows down small decisions that are repeated over and over at the low level.

I want to play a Barbarian Khan, not 100 Barbarian Middle Managers.

I think the thing about EFS is that it did a lot better at delivering the experience of being a future-feudal warlord than it did at delivering the mechanical aspects of a strategy game (competent AI; well-integrated, well-balanced systems and rules; etc). I definitely see where Jasper is coming from, but as a guy who mostly plays games for the experience, I'm ultimately in Brian's/Ben's camp. Man, so many fond memories.

My dream remakes of EFS are pretty simple: (1) Vic Davis buys the rights, does a Kickstarter, and rakes in enough of a war chest to go all-out with production values; or else (2) Paradox buys the rights and builds an EFS clone on the back of the Crusader Kings 2 system. Can you imagine how hilarious/awesome/hilariously awesome the resulting LPs would be?

(My personal candidate for game I'd most like to see done right is Empire: Total War, another title I loved despite all its flaws, but that's another story.)

I'd argue that EFS is about building up an empire from almost nothing, given that the original fall happened centuries ago and you're trying to pick up the pieces. But the Barbarian Invasion expansion for Rome was brilliant in this regard, if you played the Western Roman Empire. It nailed the zeitgeist of collapse so, so well - unruly cities, barbarian hordes, generals who mutinied at the drop of a hat... *nostalgic sigh*

Re: inverted tech progression, have you played the Fall of Rome scenario for Gods & Kings? I didn't enjoy it overall (it runs into the "Civ is not a wargame" problem that has plagued scenarios since they were introduced in Civ 2) but it did something similar - as the Roman players became weaker as they progressed down the cultural tree.

Given that Brian is the king of space games, I have no doubt he has A Friend in the League who can provide him with forbidden personal defence technology. Besides, if I remember the EFS tech tree correctly, doesn't Prana Bindu only unlock a recon unit - the tracker legion?

(Boy, I love nerding out like this)

LOL - that was fast. Tom booted him off even as I was writing out my oh so well written rebuttal.
I'll repost it here again if he turns up. :P

Of course he got gone fast once he dared to argue with Tom.

I wouldn't worry though, I get the sense that if he finds the way over here he'll probably body of work himself gone pretty damn quickly.

Oh, you know, a couple of leagues, a noble house or two, that sort of thing. ;)

Incidentally, IIRC, my character was in the Charioteers the last time I played the RPG system. ;) I always gravitate toward pilots. :)

I vaguely recall it soon led to upgraded Nobles as well, Blade Masters? It's been a while. And really, that's a Bene Gesserit reference as much as anything.

I did have a lot of fun with EFS, but aside from the bugs and incompleteness it had Civ's late game drag in spades with nothing to really stop the power of exponential growth. It was overly ambitious and a bit before its time, but now that the body of established boardgame mechanics has expanded, well I'd love to see a reworking of it, perhaps taking advantage of feedback dampening along the lines of Eclipse and/or Through the Ages.

At the Gates has now met its funding goal of $40,000. Congrats to Jon and crew! 26 days to go, too.

I haven't kicked in yet but the ideas for ATG definitely interest me, especially its promise to address mid-game/endgame sag.

Thanks again, everyone! The campaign has gone great so far, and we're about to hit our first modding-related stretch goal. :)

I know some of you weren't big fans of Civ 5 and for that reason have shied away from contributing. And I can fully understand your skepticism because there's no denying that I did make mistakes.

I just posted a lengthy article explaining why, in spite of that, ATG might still appeal to you. I go into a fair amount of detail regarding the elements of Civ 5 that I wasn't really happy with, and how I'm solving those issues in ATG.

- Jon

Everyone, go read the link that Jon just posted. Fascinating stuff.

I like that the part about diplomacy is basically: We will just copy CivIV. CivV did not work. Which is absolutely fine since I can't name a 4X game that did diplomacy better.

I don't entirely agree with this statement. The numbers under the hood and inclusion of state religions is very Civ 4-esque, but the requests will make conducting diplomacy completely different. Not only will you have many more means of building relationships, but to do so you'll actually have to be proactive about it as well.

I think the flavor and personality in SMAC has yet to be matched. In terms of mechanics, though? I'd probably agree.

Outside of 4X games I really like what Crusader Kings 2 did. It's very mechanical and not particularly "realistic," but that's why it works. I believe the recipe for the ideal diplomacy system is a blend of those two elements: strong, strategic gameplay systems coupled with distinctive and memorable character personalities.

All that's left now is wrapping up the easy part - actually making it work! :)

- Jon

I dunno, I still tend more toward Jon-in-Civ5-early-dev thinking in that I find the white box method of Civ 4 to be a little too gamey and predictable (though I definitely agree that Civ V at launch went too far in the opposite direction). Understandable mechanical factors are great, I agree, but you lose a lot when you have a relatively foolproof checklist of actions to take to avoid Attila from declaring war on you.

Very glad to hear you say this. A lot of the early discussion around Civ5's diplo game centered around exactly that - "the leaders behave like real people!" - but real people are obnoxious, and exhibiting a personality doesn't need to (in game terms) mean behaving in unpredictable and seemingly irrational and self-harming ways.

And for whatever it's worth, while I was disappointed with the condition (not design) of Civ5 on release, I'm happy to say that the subsequent patches and the expansion have gone an incredibly long way towards fulfilling the potential that was evident in the game from the start.

Yeah, this is true. In Civ4 it was a little too checkboxy, but I agree that Civ5 initially ran too far in the other direction and made other leaders unnecessarily inscrutable in the name of a "realism" that nobody seemed to want.

Maybe I am being dense, but I do not see how the requests you describe are different to CIV IVs requests for wartime aid, religious conversion or resource tribute.


Crusader Kings 2 vs SMAC is an interesting comparison, because to me they are fundamentally different approaches.
I think Crusader Kings works so well, because it basically gives you a RPG character sheet for each person, then gives you very sparse descriptions of events (A courtier fancies you. Go to her chambers? Yes/No) and lets your imagination fill in the blanks (Let's see she is attractive and was married to that traitor duke whom I beheaded. Hah this is great! Wait, she has Syphilis? Abort! Huh, why can't I deny her? Oh I have the Lustful trait. Curses! And thus ended the great Dynasty of King Henry VIII).

SMAC on the other hand works just because the writing is stellar. The mechanics of the game do not really create interesting characters (I guess you have two warmongers, two tech then/war guys and one guy who is always hopeless, because the AI can't cope with his population limit *).

If you want to combine these two approaches you run into the problem that your writers have to be really good so that I prefer them to my imagination.

* Astute readers may have noticed that I forgot Mr UN guy. This was done on purpose.

If you have a foolproof checklist then that is not a failure of the system, but a failure of balancing. You can just make the positive modifiers a lot more costly, so the benefit of not having declared war on you is somewhat equal to the cost of engaging in diplomacy.

It's still a checklist, where you're engaging with a clear mechanical set of rules instead of the fiction of ruling an empire and engaging with rival leaders. To paraphrase a great philosopher, girls nations are not vending machines that you drop kindness coins into until sex peacetime falls out.

Absolutely. The proactive angle where there are actual issues that come up is what's sorely lacking. Civ 5 having Neutral Powers ask you to do things is a step in the right direction, but still fairly limited.

I'd say King of Dragon Pass is the high mark in this regard, even though it's not a traditional 4x.

But again that is just a matter of calibrating the unpredictability correctly. CIV 4 was a bit too predictable with its " almost all leaders will never declare war at "pleased status"". But if converting to Attila's religion and taking an economic hit reduces the probability of a wardeclaration from 5% to 2% per turn then that is an interesting system.

Or to quote the great philosopher " girls nations are not vending machines that you drop kindness coins into until sex peacetime falls out, but who knows maybe if you add just another coin it might just work."

Some randomness and hidden information can make a big difference in how such things feel. Not so random as to be inscrutable, just random enough so you're not sure what the outcome will be and so have to consider all the possibilities.

It feels really weird when the designer of Civ 5 continually apologizes for it, while I myself find Civ 5 superior to 4 in almost every way. Including Diplomacy.
Flawed execution of a better system (with continuing long term work put into it) is so much better than a poor system you got used to.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Civ 5 is a bad game. As I noted in my article, I still feel the intention behind many of the changes was solid. But as you point out, there's always room to improve on the execution. If I were to make another Civ game it wouldn't be Civ 4.5, but instead a game with the ambition of Civ 5 channeled in different ways.

- Jon

You asshole! We're not THAT old. ;)

I never had a problem with Civ 5 diplomacy either. Can the leaders be capricious? Sure, but that never felt like a bad thing to me.

I... err... sorry...

I thought you knew!

- Jon

The joke's on you, because we don't really have all that much money either. :)

(BTW, if you guys haven't gone already, you need to hold the next Conifer Staff Meeting at Cliff Bell's down on Park Ave, near the ballpark. We went a couple weeks ago and it was amaaaaazing.)

To go with the example of Crusader Kings 2 you always know what your vassals think of you and why so when push comes to shove and there's an insurrection you know who hates you and who loves you and where they're gonna side. But then there are all those guys in the middle, the undecided ones or the ones who simply really love the pretender to the throne even though they also like you. They might side with you. Or they might not. And though you can make reasonable guesses you never know how it will all shake out until someone actually gets fed up with you and sees how many others he can get to follow him.

I think what makes it work so well is both the fact that everything is out in the open and while you can't look under the hood to see the random numbers the game always lets you manage the probabilities. The game also makes a point of warning you whenever a lord is pissed off enough to contemplate rebellion. A bit gamey, but it also means that whenever it happens you always know why. This means that you won't think "why the hell did that guy stab me in the back", it gives you time to check that lord and see "oh, he really wants that county from me and he hates me for being a zealot" and decide what to do about it.

Yeah, I think a large part of making it work is letting the player know why something happens.

If when your best buddy Alexander in Civ 5 backstabbed you he said something along the lines of "Sorry mate, you built so few units I just couldn't resist -- no hard feelings?"... well that wouldn't be so bad. Instead he just does it cold, without any feedback. Underneath the hood the AI is probably calculating something along just those lines, but you're left wondering if it's just random because you know it's an AI.

The trick is just to get people into anthropomorphizing the AI, so they assume there must have been a reason they couldn't see -- as you would with a live opponent. Fortunately players like to do this, and a few blurbs of text at the right points goes a long way. Such Bond Villiain Exposition I think is more important than hard numbers like "This guy likes me at 10, he'll never betray me", though I think such concrete details have a place too.

For what it's worth, I totally build ginormous empires in Civ 5. :) Especially now with G&K! Come the Rennaisance, I can mostly just keep building cities as often as I feel like it, and when I'm up against the highest-dificulty AIs, I need to because otherwise I can't pump out enough Science.

G&K made happiness a lot easier to deal with in general. Which I approve of ;)

I would say this is the key factor of pretty much any aspect of strategy game design - the player needs to have at least the illusion of knowing why something happens.

The mention of KODP is interesting, because - mechanically - it's diplomacy system is really simple. However, as Jasper notes, it succeeds admirably in making the opponents feel antromorphic which makes up for some of its shortcomings - and it also has the crucial component: you are never left in doubt about why an opposing clan acts the way they do against you. The same is true in CK2 - although there the actions may sometimes be rather absurd due to the detailed relationship modelling not always coming up with logical sensible results. But because the relationship is antromorphic _and_ transparent, the player can understand why something happens, and the weirdness can be passed over as merely human foibles.

Without the element that allows the player to rationalize the events that happen, I'm pretty sure neither of those games would be praised for their diplomacy, though. I would similarly argue that it was not the writing that made AC's diplomacy system "good" (a conclusion I'm not sure I'd agree with 100% - as I recall, it had some serious issues as well, such as demanding your surrender even in the most absurd situations); it was in large part the transparency of the mechanisms with the social engineering and explicit reputation and personality mechanisms. You were never in doubt about why you got into a war with Sparta, for instance.

But, as mentioned, I think this goes for everything in strategy games. The actual (or illusion) of being able to figure out why an event occurred is what allows the player to feel that they are moving closer to mastery of the game. Without that feeling that you are learning something that helps you in future playings, the game ceases being fun. It's why enormously ambitious games like Master of Orion 3 always end up a lot worse than their simpler predecessors. If the game mechanics become too complex or impenetrable for player's to feel that they are learning something new on each play-through, the desire to play the game quickly evaporates.

Paradox, in particular, I think have been very smart in this respect - because right from their first design in Europa Universalis - they have been extremely good at exposing their game mechanics in numbers and tooltips and messages (drilling down to what amount to detailed game logs) that make it possible (albeit not always easy) for the player to master their games if one applies the effort. I don't think that it is a coincidence that their less well received games have often been those where they've introduced new - initially impenetrable - game mechanics (or that most of them end up with dedicated cult followings of those who have undertaken the huge effort to understand them).

Thanks for a great analysis! Long reply here, but in brief I agree with most points except that I really do love small maps with few towns and few units. So I didn't mind the 1UPT limitations in Civ5 at all, and I hope that minimalist empires remain viable in At the Gates.

I agree with that in theory, but how do you translate that into a system?

I really believe that when it comes to game design, clarity has to win out. That's not to say 100% predictability is your aim, as that approach obviously has its own problems. My preference is always for clear, strategic mechanics with a pinch of variation so that it doesn't turn into chess, where success comes from meticulously planning 8 turns ahead. That works for some people, but it's not my cup of tea.

In other words, it's not so much that you always know exactly what Attila is thinking, and more that you know if you can find a way to get him to +5 you're set, but until that point you have to worry about your flank. One part mechanics, one part mystery. This is going to be less fuzzy than what some people would like, but it's easier to translate into a system that has a consistent effect that you can build strategies around.

- Jon

The fundamentals are the same, it's mainly a difference of scope and usage. Instead of having two or three opportunities per leader per game, in ATG you'll nearly always have a handful to choose from, making it much more feasibly to truly "play the diplomatic game."

I certainly won't claim that our writing will be superior to SMAC, but it's really a question of effort more than skill. Trust me, the amount of time spent on making the dialogue and personalities of the leaders in the various Civ games was... not extensive, at least compared with other features. And I'm sure that's even more true of the smaller-budget games. It wouldn't surprise me if the total man-hour count put into SMAC's leaders was more than that of every other 4X title combined.

The same basic point could be made for CK2, even though their approach is completely different. Diplomacy and character interaction were prioritized and received a huge investment.

I can't guarantee that all you need to end up with a good diplomacy system is to just pump time into it - but it sure doesn't hurt. Regardless, I encourage skepticism. It's how we stay honest and get better at what we do!

- Jon

Smaller kingdoms will definitely be viable. The economic focus in ATG is more on the strategic side with resources over owning and managing a bunch of cities. The fact that everyone has to remain on the move means that you remain in the "expansion phase" basically from start to finish.

This is particularly nice for smaller tribes, who in more traditional 4X games would have built their 3 cities and then quickly ran out of interesting things to do. It's going to require some calibration, but there's a huge amount of potential here. I've already tasted a bit of it with just a few playtests, and as a designer you usually know you're onto something when you're excited by the idea of playing your own game!

- Jon

Pretty sure that crown goes to King of Dragon's Pass. I asked the designer at one point how many lines/hours went into the writing, and although I forget his exact answer it was staggering.