Choices and more Choices

Sid Meier tells us that a game is a series of interesting choices. Few genres offer more choices than the 4X genre.

At every step, the player is presented with choices. But what makes them interesting? Implicit in each choice is the notion that it might affect how your game will go and whether you will eventually win or lose. (Or maybe some of them are just roleplay or lore.)

Explore to the north, or to the south? When you find the barbarians do you offer gifts or demand tribute? The choices you make early on will affect your future growth (one would expect).

If you build planets full of mines and space ports you expect that your game will be different than if you had built nothing but science facilities. You can make different uses of what you receive.

If you build a fleet with many capital ships, you expect it to perform differently than a swarm of smaller ones. When you compete with other empires, you can do so in a way you choose.

The Shape of the Thing

Fundamentally, the 4X offers the chance to build up something large (spanning solar systems or galaxies) and complex (every gun on every ship was a technology you researched) from a small and simple beginning.

Along the way you’re offered endless variety. It’s very satisfying. You get the feeling that you have something that is uniquely yours, and it feels as though it is successful (it’s growing, isn’t it?).

The shape this takes is a long period of hyper-linear growth and then a violent clash for victory. Or maybe victory is partly non-violent, but it is confrontational in some way that the lead-up is not.

Building Up Your Own Little Corner of the Map Does Not Make for Good Multi-player Gameplay

While you’re each crafting your own beautiful, unique empire you aren’t really interacting much. What does it matter to you if someone across the table researches power manifolds or enhanced batteries?

Clashing With Other Empires Does Not Make for Good Multi-player Gameplay

Well, it might be good, but it is rarely great. After all that build-up, should we settle for good?

The last X (Extermination) comes once everyone has built up to each other’s borders and can expand no further without conflict. If your neighbor has built a stronger force than yours (or one that counters it), it may be too late to turn the ship of state. The capabilities that took the whole game to gain cannot be changed, balanced or matched in the last few rounds of fighting. This isn’t likely to lead to a good, fun fight.

On the other hand, if your neighbor has built a force just as strong as yours, then all those choices - of what to build and research, where and when - have not made much difference, have they?

Even if the last bit of fighting might take up fewer game rounds, all that conflict takes up more wall-clock time. It has to, in order to express the complexity of all those special ships you built.

You could get into some conflict before the end, of course, but that is very risky. When any slow in your growth will cost you later on, the risk is rarely worth it to inflict losses on a neighbor.

Ways Out - How to Make Your Dreams Come True

Could the dream of 4X multiplayer - complex creative growth followed by fierce cathartic combat - be realized?

Single-player

Sure, in single-player. Take all the time you need to build. Smash the non-player forces. They don’t have feelings like resentment or boredom.

But that’s not really an answer…

Fast Take-off

What if the building-up part just went faster? What if you had the opportunity to make a few, important choices about your empire and then set at each other right away? This would mostly mean cutting time and complexity from the “expand” part.

Limits to Growth

Many (most?) 4X games have an expanding engine of empire. Conquer regions to gain resources to build the capacity to conquer yet more regions. Growth leads to more growth and war feeds itself.

But real polities have limits. Corruption, unrest, administration, garrisons… something along those lines could be added to place limits on a large empire. Then the question becomes not just where to expand, but whether to do it at all.

If growth isn’t always correct, and doesn’t always lead to more growth, then the risk of falling behind is lesser. If leaner, meaner empires have their own advantages then setbacks don’t need to be permanent. Conflict between empires can be dynamic, expanding and contracting, one and then the other having the upper hand.

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

An approach to the 4X that interests me, would be to make all of it relevant at once.

• Players begin immediately in contact with each other.
• Conflict begins from the first turn and continues throughout.
• Exploring finds are relevant to you and your neighbor.
• Every expansion you make is one that someone else can’t, and they notice it.
• Capabilities that you gain are of interest to your competitors.
• Every resource represents new possibilities of actions that you care about.
• Large, powerful empires slow under the burdens of ruleership. Small, active states gain velocity.