> IMHO the best 4x game that will come out at some point in the future won't actually follow the 4x format.

I think the problem is that the playerbase seems to want both "fair rules", where every ai you meet is playing the same game as you, and an experience of exponential growth.

I think these two demands are fundamentally impossible to do well at the same time. Too small differences early on snowball into too large differences too quickly. You either have to limit the growth hard, or you need to play against a "gm" that fudges everything behind the scenes to provide you an engaging experience throughout the game.

My wishlist for a proper civ successor is a game that takes you from a single village to a globe-spanning superpower, not on a single map with a single handful of opponents, but starting as a village with village-sized opponents which you will conquer or co-opt, expanding the scope of the game, the map and creating new opponents matched to your progress as you progress through the eras.

>My wishlist for a proper civ successor is a game that takes you from a single village to a globe-spanning superpower, not on a single map with a single handful of opponents, but starting as a village with village-sized opponents which you will conquer or co-opt, expanding the scope of the game, the map and creating new opponents matched to your progress as you progress through the eras.

In principle this could be achieved through the agar.io approach. Spawn the map with 100s of small fish. Small fish either swallow or get swallowed, and increasingly over time, you get fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger fish.

I don't personally think that the 4X genre needs to get away from the formula it has now. I keep buying, and enjoying, those games because I like the formula. I don't particularly agree, for example, that the late game is uninteresting in most 4X games. It's not as challenging, certainly, but it's great fun to watch the earlier strategic choices pay off as I come in for a victory landing.

I think it's fine if people don't like what 4X games are like currently, but I don't think that doing something different should be at the expense of those who do like what exists. One of my great frustrations with Civ VII was that they were attempting to solve a problem I don't agree the game had (boring late game), using methods that took away what I did enjoy about the game (building up a civ over time).

I also like the formula given all these games I keep playing and buying but I also think that its fundamentally broken too. The fact that each game takes hours of investment mean that its been unable to benefit from online play as much taking away the problems of AI because of how hard it is to get other people to commit to that. This means the game is less stress tested for "fair play", which results in it being less balanced along with Immortal/Deity being a hack (+1 free settler, +2 free settler, plus a bunch of flat +% to research/production).

I just think _somewhere_ there's a better receipe.

> I agree with the article in that the mechanics of the game weren't ideal. Personally as someone that LOVES 4x and has spent _way_ too much time playing them, I think the format is fundamentally flawed and cannot be saved (e.g. expanding is too overpowered, games become too dull to close out - given the win was effectively gained hundreds of turns ago,

Avid Civ/Paradox-Player here as well. I've been banging my head into 4X design for a while as well, and it's hard. In the somewhat classical formula Civ, Master of Orion, Stellaris and such provide - and even many RTS, it's always the same situation as you have in chess: The better executed early game usually wins.

And strangely enough, in a chess middle game, you have better comback opportunities. In Stellaris, you can at times lose a fight, but if you have enough defenses left and sufficiently more production than your enemy, you still win, just slower than you might have. In Starcraft, you may be able to pull out of a bad fight, If you can, and have good production, you stay ahead. Giving back a piece advantage in chess is a much bigger deal and a much bigger loss.

From there, I can't help but think that many, many 4X games in the classical formula boil down to the right few choices in the early game and then it's about correct execution/conversion. And I haven't really found a way around that.

Or, rather, a way around that is to make the situation asymmetric or rather to change the formula. They are billions comes to mind, or Against the Storm. Don't fight equal and similarly shaped empires, but something else.

Milennia has a mildly interesting approach, where you can settle or conquer cities early on, but to turn those into productive cities that you directly control creates a maintenance burden that is extremely hard to afford in the early game. Otherwise they just give an incredibly small passive income.

It could be interesting to have a first person 4x, where the player is a unit in the game (the leader) and only has local information. Up until the information age it would be mostly played by letters delivered on horseback. Perhaps also state visits and talking to other nations' diplomats.

I've had extensive thoughts about a space-based coöp 4X-like game with fog of war - jump drives can only take you near the speed of light (skipping the need for fueling g-drives and forbidding unstoppable kinetic kills), not faster, so you have to send one or more players to each system if you want to make decisions there without waiting multiple in-game years. The nice thing about relativity is that it doesn't matter if all your players are active at the same time, since the causation won't reach anyone for a while.

I did prove that this general kind of "blind coop" game/quest can be fun in a different setting ... but it was way too much work without more automation than I managed to implement. Balance and mechanics are hard to get right with constraints like this, and AIs are dumb so it's hard to automate your testing ... for something the players (and QM) will probably only stick around for once.

I recommend the Floris mod for Mount & Blade, where you get exactly this (well, except that you can't really research radio).

Yeah that would be good, that fixes the complexity in control that spirals once your civ blobs. Keeping it simple and streamlined across the entire playthrough is important.

I think it would be fun to maybe not even be entirely aligned with one country and act as some sort of third party that can impact the growth or decline of other empires. So the AI is still playing the 4x around you but you're not locked into a given team.

This might allow you to pick and choose some of the fun parts (e.g. exploring for a given civ at the start of the game, or picking a expansion spot for their second city) while sidelining the less fun parts.

MOO3 was a bit like that and failed so badly is killed the franchise

Is this a little like King of Dragon Pass?

I have “human behavior is economic behavior” permanently etched into my brain.

I also have that though my favourite quote is Lal and I've recited it in public as if it came from a real person. "Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master".

and it is! What I think is particularly good about the media from this game is that many opposing views are represented and each of them are steelman, as opposed to strawman representations. I'm not the religious sort but when Sister Miriam states:

> ... you are trampling on the garden of an angry God and he awaits you just beyond the last theorem!

I get chills.

Hell yeah. That’s another good one.

I have "what do I care for your suffering? Pain, even agony, is no more than information for the senses. You have received the input, now take control of the output."

I think, over the years since it was released, I've purchased SMAC about 5 times.

>I agree with the article in that the mechanics of the game weren't ideal. Personally as someone that LOVES 4x and has spent _way_ too much time playing them, I think the format is fundamentally flawed and cannot be saved (e.g. expanding is too overpowered, games become too dull to close out - given the win was effectively gained hundreds of turns ago, AI being too costly to implement and difficult to balance). IMHO the best 4x game that will come out at some point in the future won't actually follow the 4x format.

Yeah, your decisions are very important in the early game (because that's what determines the speed at which your snowball grows), but as your faction grows, your individual decisions become more and more meaningless and monotonous.

One possible approach is to have the player's role gradually shift somehow, from micromanagement to providing overall strategic direction.

OP states:

>Meanwhile the automation functions are undermined by being abjectly stupid more often than not. Your governor will happily continue researching string theory while his rioting citizens are burning the place down around his ears. You can try to fine-tune his instructions, but there comes a point when you realize that it’s easier just to do everything yourself.

I wonder if turning it into a programming game could help address this problem? Then again, I'd be tempted to re-use my "code" across various playthroughs. Probably most players would go to the wiki to copy some "code" which is known to perform quite well.