Interview by: Todd Brakke and William Abner

This little chat was actually done during E3 at the 2K booth behind closed doors in their sports bar. We thought we had lost this little ditty but recently uncovered it and since it still has some good info we thought we'd share it with you. Better late than never. right?

The changes to the combat. What do you think are the chief benefits of going to the hex-based tile system? The use of flanking? Etc.

Sure. Combat’s been the one thing that’s probably changed the least since the beginning of Civilization. It’s been stacks for a very long time. Fans will get nervous about this when we start talking about a new combat system. But John Schafer, our lead designer, he’s been a Civ player his entire life. He’s also inspired from a game way back when he was young, called Panzer General--

Yeah. That’s going back a bit.

Yeah, that’s kind of his inspiration for this. He’s an old-school gamer, even though he’s not all that old, but he’s been a gamer forever. And he loved the thought of taking the combat out of the cities. Bringing these stacks down to individual units where you can actually take advantage of the terrain. Rivers mean something. Hills mean something. It’s not just who has the biggest stack. It’s not just who’s pounding the most units inside of a city. So terrain really matters. We’re pulling combat out of the cities and into the landscape. So you can do things like have bonuses for flanking and have friends on your flanks fighting. If you’re positioning your units well on top of hills – did you see the demo?

Yeah, we just got out. I didn’t even think of Panzer General. That’s a really good example.

Yeah, it was a big inspiration to him. He didn’t want it to be complicated. Civilization, at its heart, is not a military game. It just makes for a really compelling E3 demo. It’s still simple to use. It’s very straight forward, but it really brings something different than we had with stacks, in the past.

Can you tell us some more about the Social Policy system?

That’s an older way to play out of a game. Basically a culture victory, if you have the top three cities over a certain threshold that have the most culture, you achieve that, you achieve a cultural victory. But culture really didn’t interact with the other types. What we’re doing with the Social Policy tree is culture now acts like currency to tailor your civ, so even if you’re playing a military game, if you’re generating culture you can actually focus that military game even more with these bonus. These are powerful bonuses. Some of the bonuses are good for military, for science, for happiness. But if you’re focused on a culture win, you’re obviously going to use specific branches that really help your culture. It’s just a really great way to integrate your culture into the rest of the game.