I am Soren Johnson, designer/programmer of Old World, Offworld Trading Company, and Civilization 4. AMA!

This is probably a big one, but can you speak to some of the most important lessons you learned during your time working on Civilization IV?

That is a big one! Probably my most important lesson was the value of being willing to drop old assumptions (of how things always worked from Civ 1-3) and trusting the community more than I trust myself.

I heard you mention in an interview that you are trying to engage players fully in all 4 Xs.

Which aspect did you find most underutilized in the genre?

What were some of the solutions you found to engage players?

Honestly, I don't think about the 4X that explicitly. What I tend to focus on is making sure that every decision is genuinely interesting. For example, in a traditional 4X where you move your worker each turn (and don't spend resources to start improvements), there is really no reason NOT to keep building farms, mines, etc. Which means that it is not a very interesting choice. In Old World, NOT using your workers is sometimes necessary for various reasons. One of the interesting experiences from early MP was that players who focused their Orders on military at the expense of infrastructure - especially for building roads to get their units to the front - may take an early lead but lose in the end.

You've designed a couple of my favourite games OTC, Spore and Civ 4.

When you're designing a game, and in the process of building it are you thinking about the specific concepts that you need to get out on the page so to speak? Like "I really want to make this resource management system work and build a game around that" or do you have a more general idea "I want to make a 4x game and work from there"

How important is it that your game is both accessible for low skill players and engaging for high skill players? I know you were a big fan of hardcore strategy games and thats a big part of your background.

I am constantly relearning the same lesson, which is the best design is embarrassingly simple, often so simple that you don't try it at first. We had a number of iterations on the victory system in Old World, one version had multiple different victories that you opted into during the game and gave various points for all sorts of thing (+1 per Temple, +5 per barbarian camp clear, etc.) It was lame. In the end, we just used the super simple VP system from MP (+1 per city, +1 per Legendary city, +1 per Wonder) and winning with 10 ambitions. If you are open to simple design solutions, then you can find a way to make the game work for the hardcore and bring in new players at the same time.

Another way to answer this is that a lot of the complexity in Old World, and my other games, is OPTIONAL complexity. You will be able to play and succeed in Old World even if you don't realize that connecting your cities to the territories of other civs you are at Peace with gives you a Money bonus. You'll do better if you learn that, but you can also play fine without it. Games get into trouble if players hit a wall if they don't fully understand a game.

Big fan of your no-nonsense design, Soren. With Civ 4, you showed a great focus on functionality before adding more features, particularly with making multiplayer and Python modding part of the game's bedrock. How does Old World continue on this philosophy or depart from it?

Old World was a multiplayer game only for the first year or so of development, and we inherited all of the modding capability of Offworld and extended it where we could. (The UI in Old World is much more moddable than in Offworld as it uses XML markup as its basis.)

At some point, the focus shifted to SP because that is where the players usually start, but MP and modding are super important to us.

Did you expect such warm reception form community and streamers since EA day 1?

Mohawk Games seems to be a small studio, how do you share your work and how can you accomplish so much by having so little crew?

We never expect a warm reception, but we certainly hope for it. It's been wonderful to see, however. We've been working on this for a long time - since shipping Offworld - and there are plenty of moments when we would not be sure if it would all pay off.

We can succeed as a small studio because we prioritize which parts of the development process matter and which parts doing. Basically, we focus on how the game plays, not how it looks or how it is going to sell. I think that can most easily be seen in how much people like the interface, especially with unexpected features like infinite tooltips and undo.

Thanks for all the great questions - I need to get back to bug fixing for next week's update. I may be able to answer some of the questions I missed when I have some free time!

Awesome job on the civ 4 AI, it's probably the strongest in the series. There's still a YouTube community for playing against it. Two questions:

• Could you actually beat the AI on deity difficulty during development, or did you just put it in the game thinking "lol have fun with that one"?

• When developing the game AI, did you have any self-play infrastructure in place for testing if a new behaviour made it stronger? Or did you just kinda play around with it to see what seemed to work?

My general theory with Civ-style games is that you can never make a difficulty level easy enough or a difficulty level hard enough for the players who are out there. Thus, I don't think I ever really attempted to play on Deity. It's really just a benchmark for the best players.

For Civ4, I had a system in place where the AI would play itself and pause after 400 turns or so. Back then, computers were slower, so I had to run it each night right before leaving, so the first thing I always saw in the morning is how the AI was currently doing. It was usually pretty obvious if I screwed it up somehow! We have a similar system with Old World where AI test runs are done automatically, now as part of a unit test process.

Were you ever torn between one unit per tile and a system more like civ 4? Or was it obvious to you from the beginning that Old World should have 1UPT?

Sooo... this was a big debate over the course of the project. I was actually the main proponent on the team for multiple units per turn, but the team pushed me to try 1UPT. We had a system that worked very well for multiple units in that it was simple and effective - basically, every unit on a tile takes damage when attacked. Thus, it was a tricky choice whether to stack multiple units to get a kill and then know you would suffer a devastating counter-attack the next turn.

However, they convinced me to try out 1UPT, and it was immediately clear it was a better system. What makes it work well in our game is that our maps are VERY big by 4X standards and the preset city sites enforces a lot of space between cities. In order for 1UPT to work, you need A LOT of space on the map to avoid bottlenecks and traffic jams.

What feature of Old World do you think is the most unique compared to others in the historical 4X genre?

The Orders system is probably the most unique as it treats movement as a resource, which creates a much different feel for how you interact with your units. In some ways, I like to think of the game a turn-based version of a real-time strategy games, where Orders are an abstraction of attention (which works well for the time period where communication between regions was measured often in weeks).

I love the orders system and the ability to invest a turn in a march! Where did the idea for orders come from and how did you decide what actions would take an order?

Believe it or not, I was inspired by social games a decade ago (like Frontierville and Mafia Wars) which used actions to gate players from doing too much in one sitting. Of course, they used that as a, er, monetization opportunity, which I'm not really interested in. To me, it seemed like an interesting way to turn time/attention into a resource, so I got curious how it would feel inside a 4X game.

(I'm sure I was also influenced by board games, many of which use action points.)

What would you say to the people criticising Old World as a Civ clone?

A common response from people playing the game is they are surprised how much it does not play out like Civ.

What prompted you leaving Firaxis Games?

Firaxis is not a large company, and they only work on a couple games at a time. When I left, they were working on Civ 5 and what became the new XCOM. I really had nothing left to give Civ at that point - it took me a decade to come up with enough ideas for Old World - and XCOM was Jake's baby through and through, so there really wasn't anything for me to do except to hang around and bother Jon. I think it all worked out for the best - was very happy to see how much Civ 5 grew the fanbase for the series! (>10M copies sold!)

Do you know Sid Meier at all? What's he like?

Sid was an inspiration for me as a kid, certainly one of my inspirations for wanting to get into the industry. It was a great pleasure and honor to work with him, and my games will always just be offshoots of what he pioneered.

Loving the game! One part of the game I really like is the CK2 style of family management through the ages, are there plans to expand on the features in that area of the game?

Events and characters are going to be a major focus of the Early Access period. It's the part of the game we had the least amount of experience with - basically, zero experience! - so it's been more of a struggle to improve. We hope to learn from the community about what they do and don't like. So far, people seem to like the soap opera-style events! We also are looking forward to player-written events very much (there is an in-game event editor).

Did you help design Civ 4 Colonization? I sense much more influence in Old World from Colonization than the traditional Civ franchise.

I have played Colonization and find it an interesting alt-Civ game. (btw, Alex Mantzaris was heavily involved with that game and works on Old World as well.)

What is your favorite programming language and Why?

I'm really happy with C#, honestly. It does a great job of allowing me to code quickly and safely. Leads to some performance/memory headaches, of course, but I think ease of development is most important for a highly iterative team.

What's surprised you most about the process of developing Old World? What did you not expect to happen that happened, or that you expected to happen that didn't?

I was surprised by how easily the Orders system fit into the framework of traditional 4X design. I'll be curious (and flattered) to see if it gets copied elsewhere. I had plans for the family system to be much more punishing - their units used to go on strike and attack you and I was planning civil wars - but I think there is a fundamental difference between what players will accept in a 4X vs a grand strategy (Paradox) game.

old world! What a game!

Would you like to add more means of interacting with far away empires in old world?

one might say that the concepts and resources of orders, Movement-fatigue and training makes geographical distance quite dynamic. Given priority, an area in reach can be reached quite quickly - at an unmisstakable cost in other oportunities... but the furhest corners of the world are very far fetched to interact with forcefully,

...players and civilized Ai can declare ”war” from across a map that would be costly to wage war across - its not just a matter or logistics, time and material army maintenance, but great oporunity costs... (as compared to most hex based 4x that look and feel similarly)

You must have thought about this as you made the game?

I'm not sure how to define it, but there is some sort of actual truth you can get to if your mechanics are simple enough. The Orders system doesn't explicitly dictate that wars on the other side of the world probably don't make sense, but it's a natural result of how the system works, which is a good abstraction of attention and communications and logistics and so on.

what did you set out to improve over civ with old world?

I wasn't looking to improve Civ, per se, as it's a very different game. Taking on all of world history is sort of an amazing and terrible idea at the same time. What I wanted to do is find out the benefits of a 4X game at a human scale. If every year is a turn, what would it be like if the leaders were flesh and blood and come and go? Going from a militaristic leader to a scientific one could be interesting, and it's hard to make that work thematically in Civ. (Although it's interesting to see that Humankind probably has a similar design with taking on a new culture each age.)

Hey Soren,

What games or mods (4x or otherwise) have you taken parts from as inspiration for Old World?

oh man - lots and lots of game! Obviously, Crusader Kings had a big influence on the game although I think I actually borrowed more ideas from the Total War series in terms of how characters work (really enjoyed Attila). I had a better response for Offworld about which specific games influenced that project (Belter, MULE, Age of Empires 2, Railroad Tycoon), but I think it's not quite as obvious with Old World.

Was the house system at all inspired by Civ IV's Civilization trait system (Aggressive, Organized, Expansive etc) as a way to have similar bonuses that are shared between civilizations, yet due to unique mixing and matching, still feel unique in the hands of each civ?

I don't think it was a conscious influence but, obviously, it's likely coming from a similar place. I think it works well because there is no way we would be able to design 28 unique families (7 civs x 4 families each) that would be interesting, but mixing and matching the different bonuses is automatically interesting, like different combinations of card piles in Dominion. It's design efficiency.

Your top-3 fav. games? 👨‍💻

Off the top of my head: - Pirates! - Railroad Tycoon - Age of Empires 2

Soren, HUGE FAN of yours! Old World is amazing, too! I've seen A LOT of people ask about a roadmap or rough outline for the future development of Old World, since it'll be in Early Access for over a year.

Can you please publicly answer that question?

Also, what major items do you think are still in need of improving?

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Edit: Also, some people seriously dislike the music (I'm not sure why). Here's one recent example on the r/4Xgaming sub: https://www.reddit.com/r/4Xgaming/comments/geocwd/initial_thoughts_on_old_world/. Is the music in the game final?

The music list will get expanded over the Early Access period. The current soundtrack is what we were able to license at this point.

Thanks! We don't have an official roadmap because we are going into Early Access to discover what we should focus on. The game is "feature complete", so to speak, for single-player in the sense that there aren't any new systems to be added, but we are going to iterate for over a year on what is already there. Multiplayer is coming as well, with lots of different modes (with/without events, asynchronous, synchronous, play-by-cloud, persistent server, etc)

What's the most satisfying bug you've ever fixed?

Man, I wish I had a good answer for this. I remember a fun one from Civ3 where players were abusing the fact that the AI was peaking under the fog-of-war to see which cities were and weren't defended to manipulate where the AI was sending its invasion fleet. You could get the AI stuck in an eternal loop going back and forth between cities for the rest of the game if you wanted.

Bought Old World because I was a big fan of OTC and the Civ series.

I would like to say that while it obviously still needs some polishing, I really like that it feels like a game that scratches my Civ itch but it is most definitely not trying to be Civ.

One of my favorite features is Orders, how did you come up with the idea of orders?

What is one feature you feel like needs the most work before release?

I answered the Orders question here: https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gftr6m/i_am_soren_johnson_designerprogrammer_of_old/fpvnn5e/

We are going to be examining all aspects of the game, but the system we are probably most watchful of is events and characters as it has the most potential and also is the part of the game we have the least experience with.

what was firaxis' design process like? how did you find such solid designs? was yhere a lot of iterating?

Firaxis's design process is highly iterative - the only thing that matters is the gameplay, and the focus is on getting a game playable as soon as possible. I know with many of Sid's games - for example, Civ Rev - he would have a weekly meeting just to hear feedback from the team on their experiences playing the game. Usually, if they met on Friday, by Monday, there would be a new version with changes based on their feedback.

I'm looking to develop Old World the same way. We are going to be pushing update at the beginning of each week, with changes based on feedback from the week before.

Long time Civ fan here. I would love to check out Old World, is it multiplayer? My wife and I like to game together so would like to know if there are any options for us to play together. Can't seem to find anything on the product page about it.

We have been playing Old World as a MP game for a long time, but MP has a lot of technical challenges that SP does not, so the MP features will be updated periodically during the Early Access period. We want to support ALL the ways people want to play (team, coop, with/out events, a/synchronous).

Ok, I need confirmation on an Easter egg in civ 4. I've never seen it since nor mentioned anywhere.

Is there an Easter egg that makes the education tech image change to say "Civ = $"?

Yes, I think I remember that! Not sure who was responsible. (It was my fault making the Internet icon Al Gore. We were struggling to find a simple way to show the Internet with an icon, and somehow everyone just got that Al Gore=Internet. I felt kind of bad about it because he got a bad rap with that quote. Indeed, I'm a big Al Gore fan... but just couldn't pass it up!)

One of my friends who is a huge fan of civ (because he wins it the most between our group of friends) said this "It's definitely just a war game masquerading as a city builder tbh I get no time to actually city build as i have to rush out all my units"

I think he feels this way because hes useful long stretches of peace in civ. Is that the feel you are going for? I for one am happy to see a more aggressive 4X game come to the market. One were a military doesnt really get truley dated.

Yes, that's an interesting issue. Combat is not optional in Old World the way it might be in other 4X games - the game really shines if the player is forced to make hard choices between spending Orders on military vs workers. That's why we have barbarian raids, so that even if the player has completely "won" the diplomacy side of the game, military will still be a part of the game.

Hi Soren, cool to read you worked at Firaxis Games. Any chance we could see some sort of Alpha Centauri-like videogame coming after this?

Alpha Centauri was awesome and directly influenced many features in Civ 4 (the Civics system, diplomacy, promotions). Since EA owns the IP and Take2 owns Firaxis, their only option is making unofficial sequels like Beyond Earth.

Hi Soren. Maybe this question has been asked, but I was wondering how difficult/expensive it is to develop a game from the stage of mere idea for someone who has no knowledge of game or any other programming? We have a group of a very experienced RL managers from various industries but zero technical knowledge... Thank you!

You definitely need to find some good programmers. You can, of course, go a long way with something like GameMaker (there are million+ sellers built with it), so maybe try that out first?

1. I normally correlate your games with good AI. What are the choices in design when making an AI system to the game? Does it have to be bonuses? Each AI has to have different personalities?

2. What are the biggest lessonsbyou took after releasing OTC? Are there features in later civ titles (5/6) that you found interesting?

I try to design my games in a way that the AI is able to handle the features because an interesting game that the AI can't play is sort of useless after the player masters the system. However, I've been moving away from the philosophy slowly. OTC had some features (the hologram) that we never even attempted to teach the AI as the player's would never trust the AI with it anyway, so I gave myself permission to design some human-only features. With Old World, I've embraced true asymmetry. Even though the AI does many things the player does - and follows the same rules as the player - there are many parts of the game that the AI does not encounter. The AI does not have ambitions or events, for example, as they just don't make sense with a human at the center of the game. I didn't want human to suddenly lose to an AI's ambition victory because that sounds like a horrible experience - the fact that we don't have to waste dev time on teaching the AI about ambitions is a nice bonus. It makes even less sense for events as some events can lead to war or peace or marriages. Imagine if you discovered that you are now at peace with an AI because of a choice they made for one of their events! Civ 5/6 have a lot of interesting ideas and features. 1UPT is something we borrow, obviously, but also the concept of the "one true button" that will lead you through your turn, from decision to decision. It was interesting to find out the Civ6 was putting its buildings on the map via districts as we were already doing something similar but a little different - one improvement per tile, end of story.

How do you plan to design real strategic depth for Old World that is not easily figured out by the player?

That's a tricky question as we don't aim to make it hard for players to understand the game. I think the best approach to depth is analyzing all the decisions made in the game and questioning whether they are interesting, whether they are repetitive, whether the player actually has alternative. Those questions will help guide a designer on what to cut, what to change, and what to emphasize.

What made you arrive at having the max level for units be five in old world? and the different kinds of promotions available?

Its a small thing, but significant, particularly with respect to highly advanced and experienced armies can be effective while being easier to command than armies that find strength in numbers..!

Unit can get super powerful if they have a ton of promotions, so I think we're a little afraid of the uber-unit. Also, limiting promotions to five means there will me more differentiation between what promotions a unit does have. Also, we wanted some "Max Level Units" ambitions. I expect this to definitely be a feature that modders experiment with!

What do you feel is the best solution to one of the most common complaints about the 4x genre; that late-game often feels like a grinding slog?

The Orders system? That's one of the purposes behind it in Old World. If you have 100 units and 20 orders, you only have 20 moves, not 100 moves. Also, Old World has a shorter turn count than most 4X games as the first-half of the game is usually (always?) the best part of a 4X game. (Having said that, a turn of Old World is much more meaty than a turn of a regular 4X because you have a lot more options of what to do with your Orders.)

Hi Soren,

I will always ask about Civ3, so: have you followed any of the several attempts by fans to create a Civ3 clone or inspired game? If so what are your thoughts?

On Old World: it obviously looks a lot like Civ and inherited some of the formula, but you've built in a lot of new systems that borrow more from grand strategy. Do you see OW as a direct response or competitor to Civ, or are you taking the genre off in a new direction? Whose fans are you most trying to appeal to?

And finally, has there been any discussion on availability post Epic exclusive? Support for Linux?

Didn't realize there was an community Civ3 project. That's interesting - always awesome to hear when they keep old games like this alive! Civ3 had some interesting ideas, and you might enjoy this podcast I did on it: http://www.devgameclub.com/blog/2020/3/4/dgc-ep-201-bonus-interview-with-soren-johnson

Old World is a new direction for 4X games, inspired by Paradox games but also full of ideas I've been stockpiling for a decade based on some of the core problems that 4X games suffer from.

I wouldn't hold out much hope on a Linux version unless we start selling the millions...

Yeah, I heard the podcast. Great talk! Follow up question on that: you mentioned that you made the AI data driven so that it had no concept of eg. building temples for happiness, it just balanced costs vs effects. That was great for mod support but maybe didn't result in the most strategic decisions (not that any 4X I know does great in that regard). Is that a model you still follow in your AI design, and have you picked up any other design techniques for making it mod-friendly?

Yes, that is a model we follow in all of our AI work. The same was true in Civ 4, OTC, and OW. For all of those, we also opened up the AI code for modders, which can really take it to the next level.

What would you say is the AI of Old World currently at compared to the potential you still see with it?

I'd say the AI is farther along than we had hoped it would be at this point, much thanks to Alex Mantzaris who is responsible for it. I was worried about how the AI would handle Orders, but with another year of development, I think it should be in very good shape by release.

Mi fav. part of the game is the family/lineage/character management; will this part get more features, options, depth, events etc?

==EDIT==

Loving the game so far :)

Thanks! The character system is going to be a major focus for us during Early Access, so you can expect to see this system improve over time.

Love your games, looking forward to this one! It seems odd that the Epic Games store page never discloses the game is early access. How do you feel about the shift to early access marketing? Do you think it's a better model for the kind of game you make than waiting for a formal release? (Also thinking back to the way the Civ games were so greatly improved by their DLC expansions; a form of early access development in itself.)

Yeah, we have an Early Access symbol on our key art, but I noticed that the store doesn't highlight that it's Early Access automatically. I will be talking to Epic about that. Fortunately, people seem happy with the game as it is now?

I LOVE the Early Access period. It's hard, stressful, and lonely to make a game without players, so I love being able to get direct feedback. Leyla and I are living on Discord right now, pulling in all the opinions we can about the game.

Woah! Awesome! I love your games. Are there any plans to extend the existing modding functionality in offworld trading company?

And whats been your favorite game to work on over the years?

Offworld is already pretty moddable, but I don't think we are planning on extending it. Our modding focus is on Old World, especially as 4X games are a great framework for modding. Old World will go places Offworld didn't (like with a truly moddable UI).

Civ 4 will always hold a special place in my heart as it achieved things (a Grammy?!?) that it's just not fair to aim for with other projects.

If you were to come up with a action game, what would bring to it from your previous work on strategy games to make it a unique game?

I'm not sure I would be good at designing action games! I think my design brain is pretty highly optimized for strategy games, and turn-based ones at that.

Are you taking on any AI design/programming contract work at the mo? 😉

Serious question!

Sorry, not currently! We are staying small and working longer on projects because that is a better mix for higher-quality games.

Is that anything like Kingdom for Keflings?

Dunno - never played it!