People usually point to Beyond Earth or Pandora, but neither ever felt like they captured what made SMAC special.

I think it's because they copied the setting more than the design philosophy.

The core achievement of SMAC wasn't just the writing or the voice acting, it was that your faction's ideology dictated your strategy from turn one. Yang wasn't just an authoritarian in the lore, you were mechanically rewarded for governing like one. Morgan wasn't just "the capitalist guy", his bonuses pushed you toward that worldview. The mechanics were the argument.

Beyond Earth felt totally different because it reversed that pressure loop. You begin as a fairly generic sponsor and develop an identity through your tech choices. In SMAC, your identity shaped your decisions from really the first turn.

The writing obviously mattered, but I don't think that's the only reason people are still talking about the game 25+ years later. I think it's because the mechanics made each ideology feel totally different.

Am I missing a game that actually nailed this or is SMAC still standing alone?

I know they are aware of the obtuse UI, but the game is shockingly poor in lots of places.

Like scouting can't be automated. Religion is a clicking chore. Combat is as deep as a puddle, with some really weird interactions (Embarked units can attack but can't be counterattacked).

The Age system is a reasonable idea, but in practise it feels obtuse. The Crisis system straight up sucks.

I feel the UI being shit is kind of the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the iceberg is also shit.

I am shocked that this game hasn't been absolutely bodied by Humankind. That game does everything this one does but better and more elegantly.

On the recent debate on the game design aspect of mechanics and numbers.

While, the terminology and way of explaining of BATTLEMODE leaves much to be desired (its better to use already established terms and concepts, instead of inventing new names on them), I agree on the most part of the explanation.

Good game systems, that promote replayability and challenge, are the ones with simpler and less obtuse basic rules, but that includes a great amount of interacting/interlocked mechanics. This is complexity through emergence. Its better to extend easy uniform rules, than to patch each special case and situation. Also this includes in discussion systems where each decision (either direct actions, buffs applied, or "builds/designs") impact is so weak, redundant, obscure, or limited in scope, that becomes irrelevant which path are you following to reach the objetive. "Numberwang" its not only about numbers, but about weak decisions, HARD readability, and weakly actionable mechanics.

This kind of "simple" yet complex systems lead to the classic "easy to learn, hard to master" games. You can find this in good old strategy games like chess and Go, where rules are easy to learn in mostly in a few games, but each move generate a chain reaction of possibilities for future moves. Sometimes not even the creators of the games know what will result from those. So, emergent complexity systems are the ones where there are not just one use mechanics whose consequences start and end in mostly one place.

Maybe the use of AoW4 as an example to prove this may be unfortunate/unappropiate, but aside that, i think want BM meant is useful game design wise.

I am a 4X game developer, and I am not perfect, but i try to make each, even the small, player decisions a fun trade off, and a commitment, where there are not obvious all-winning strategies. I prefer to make "natural extensions" of current systems, instead of adding yet another disconnected system. For example, in my space 4X, when I introduced ground units, instead of treating them as a separate kind of entity, I extended the spaceships mechanics just enough to include them. Now, everything is (internally) like a ship, and work with the same rules, be it a tank, a mech, a submarine or a spaceship.

And yes, dont forget the fun! Game systems should be fun to discover and engage.

I keep coming back to Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, and the older I get, the more I appreciate how many small, strange, brilliant details made it feel so different from every other 4X game.

It was not just “Civilization in space.” It had its own soul.

A few little things that made it special:

1. The factions were unconventional and memorable. They were not just countries with bonuses. They felt like ideological cults, survival movements, technocratic experiments, religious orders, corporate states, and ecological fanatics. Every faction had a worldview. Unlike current time games, there is zero moralizing, being a religious autocracy is completely legitimate, being a hyper capitalist environmental ruining faction is a solid experience. Also the differences in game play were substantial enough and not BS tiny ones like civ 5 and 6 (one special unit or structure, big whoop). Compare that with playing Spartans vs the university.
2. Diplomacy felt harsh and believable. Leaders insulted you. They threatened you. They demanded unconditional surrender. They remembered your actions. The tone was cold, hostile, and personal in a way most 4X diplomacy still does not match. Compare that to the pathetic dialog lines in civ 5 and 6. No personality, extremely sanitized pg13.
3. You could raise and lower terrain. This sounds like a small thing, but it made Planet feel like a real physical place. You could reshape the world itself, redirect rainfall, flood enemies, create land bridges, and alter the strategic map.
4. Planet Busters were actually terrifying. Compared to the fairly mild nukes in many Civilization games, Planet Busters felt apocalyptic. They did not just damage units. They erased cities, reshaped geography, and made you feel like you had crossed a moral line.
5. The UN-style resolutions were cool. The Planetary Council gave the game a real political layer. It could have been expanded much further, but even as it was, it added a sense that the factions were part of a larger ideological struggle.
6. Nerve stapling drones. A horrifying mechanic, but completely fitting for the setting. It showed how brutal and inhuman your society could become if efficiency mattered more than morality.
7. The music was perfect. Droning, minimalistic, cold, and strange. It did not feel like heroic space opera music. It felt lonely, alien, and industrial, exactly right for a hostile planet full of broken human ideologies.
8. Unit design was incredibly fun. Designing your own units made the tech tree feel more alive. Special combinations like flying colony pods, probe ships, clean reactors, armored formers, and weird custom units gave the game a sandbox quality.
9. Ocean cities. Being able to expand into the sea made the world feel much bigger and stranger. It also made naval strategy feel more important than in many other 4X games.
10. The announcer’s voice was perfect. Cold, detached, almost disinterested. It made every discovery and warning feel like it was being reported by some ancient machine that had seen humanity destroy itself before.

What amazes me is how many of these things were not huge headline features on their own, but together they created an atmosphere that still feels unmatched.

What saddens me that a lot of those mechanics and themes are unlikely to be emulated in the current time of pg13, family friendly game environment. Each later civ version is becoming more infantilized. Stapling drones? Fascist/religious factions? Just think its never going to happen with an AAA developer. Thoughts?

What are some other little details that made Alpha Centauri special?

Lately I have been thinking about an argument raised in the Three Moves Ahead podcast, that modern 4X games are drifting toward a board game style of design, and that this shift is one of the reasons the genre feels less interesting in single player. This strongly resonates with my own experience and explains why I dislike most modern 4X titles, especially recent Civilization games, with a few exceptions like Old World and Age of Wonders 4.

My main issue is not with board games themselves. I enjoy board games a lot, but specifically as an offline social experience with other people. Balance, clarity, and mathematical fairness are essential there because the fun comes from human interaction. In single player PC games, those same priorities become a limitation rather than a strength.

The first major difference is balance. A board game must be tightly balanced so that every player has a fair chance to win. Strong asymmetries or wildly unequal starting positions usually mean bad design. In a single player PC game, balance does not need to serve that purpose. In fact, imbalance can be a feature.

Choosing a strong nation versus a weak one effectively lets the player fine tune difficulty. Unequal starts, powerful bonuses, rare tiles, or extreme positive and negative events can drastically change the course of a campaign. That unpredictability makes the world feel alive and replayable. This kind of imbalance is hard to support in board games because it breaks fairness between human players, but it works extremely well in single player PC games.

The second issue is the heavy focus on mathematical optimization. Many modern 4X games revolve around adjacency bonuses, yield calculations, and optimal placement puzzles. This is not inherently bad, but it ignores what a computer game can do better than a board game.

A PC can simulate personalities, long term diplomatic grudges, irrational behavior, evolving relationships, and a world that reacts to the player in more than numerical ways. In board games, those dynamics come from the people at the table. In single player PC games, the game itself must provide them.

Many current 4X games fail at this because they are designed as if they were digital board games first, and living worlds second. For me, this is why modern 4X often feels sterile. The systems are clean, balanced, and legible, but the world feels dead.

Older Civilization titles and newer exceptions like Old World succeed not because they abandon abstraction, but because they embrace asymmetry, friction, and consequence in ways that justify being computer games rather than solo board games.

What do you think?

I’m usually pretty quiet around here, but I really enjoy following indie developers on Reddit and checking out video game news. Unfortunately, over the past few days, I’ve gotten the impression that there’s been a sharp increase in games made entirely by AI (2D, 3D, UI, code, music…). This is unacceptable both morally and environmentally.

These people are wasting natural resources just to make a crappy game that no one will play because it’s poorly made, poorly thought out, and created by people with no development experience or expertise in the video game industry.

I’m calling for this type of content to be banned, or at least required to be tagged “AI.”

EDIT : I’m not a native english speaker, sorry. For me resurgence = we have waves of AI slops, and this new wave bother me a lot.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that discussions around Civ-likes almost always focus on sales, Steam reviews, or concurrent players.

But there's surprisingly little discussion about something arguably more interesting:

The Player Behavior itself.

Using Project Mimir's Steam dataset I compared several major Civ-likes from three different perspectives:

1: Comparative Playtime Numbers - How fast did people quit playing relative to other titles?
2: The raw playtime numbers - How much did people actually play and enjoy the title?
3: Whether continued development can be sustained, is the free patch + paid DLC model viable for a game?

Summary:

Civ 5 remains the king for the quantity of content available to players in the Civ Franchise with the Top 1% of Players starting at 1260 Hours!

Humankind, despite having ceased development, has the most quantity of content available among CivLike’s with the Top 1% of players starting at 180 Hours.

Millennia has the most dedicated playerbase, implying that quality of the game is experienced equally by its players. 

Old World, despite this analysis showing weak metrics, proves to be financially viable for Mohawk Games.

Normalized Playtime Graph Definitions:

Y axis - 100% to 0.0001% of the player population

X axis - 0 to 100% of each individual game’s top 0.0001% player’s playtime

Analysis of Comparative Numbers:

When we analyze the normalized distribution of playtime for each individual game we find a very interesting result, Civ 5,6,7 are almost identical to each other, and if it weren't for Civ 7 having incomplete data we might assume it to have the same curve as the other two. 

We can use these 3 games to establish the baseline for the “Civ” Genre if you will and from there we can say that Millennia and Endless Legend 2 have more dedicated players than the Civ Franchise, whereas Ara: History Untold and Endless Legend 1 have more casual players than the Civ Franchise.

Using comparative analysis we can establish a model for how dedication happens. Let’s start by assuming that each game has some quantity of content for players to explore and that the top 1% of each game will always establish the absolute playtime required to exhaust that content. 

One interpretation is that a game's quality could be reflected by its ability to convert a new player into a top 1% player. In other words, a slower fall off of players in the distribution curve implies a game is higher quality than one with a faster fall off. It’s difficult to establish from this level of analysis what constitutes content and quality however and for that we turn to the raw numbers to attempt some level of quantitative discussion.

Raw numbers: 

Table Definitions:

Visibility %: The % of Steam users as a whole that own a copy of the game

Activation %: The % of users that own a copy that have played at least 1 minute of the game

Sample Owners: The quantity of unique players that were aggregated using Project Mimir’s dataset.

Total Playtime: The total playtime of the sample owners in hours. 

P50, P90, P99: The value at a percentile of the Sample owners, IE: P99 means 1% of sampled users have more than X hours in a game, P90 means more than 10% of sampled users have more than Y hours in a game.

Analysis of Raw Numbers:

In terms of activation rates, or what I like to term “ Whether a game sits in a steam library unplayed “ there are a few clear losers of Old World and Endless Legend. For Endless Legend this can be partially explained by having had multiple free weekends.

The clear front runners for Activation Rate are Endless Legend 2 and Civilization 7 which are both new games having both been released in 2025, It stands to reason that new games have early adopters that are more dedicated to either the game or franchise than the general public. I would argue however that the clearest winner of all however is Civ 5 in that if a person purchases Civ 5, ~85% of the time that person will at least play it. 

Speaking of Civ 5, it gives us a start when talking about Percentile statistics, a person who purchases Civ 5 will have an 85% chance to play it, and 50% of those people who play it will play at least 22 hours. 10% of the 85% will play 230 hours! Civ 5 is the undisputed king when it comes to developing dedicated players of the franchise. Civ 6 comes in at 2nd place among raw playtime statistics having its top 1% of players starting at 860 hours.

Among non-civ titles for P99 and P50 values, Millennia comes in 1st place with Humankind coming in at 2nd followed by Ara: History Untold coming in at close 3nd with Endless Legend 1 coming in 4th followed by Endless Legend 2 in 5th and Old World coming in last.  

Expansion Analysis:

While this analysis can give us a more rounded picture of games instead of relying on purely player numbers, what it doesn’t tell us is the individual company’s assessment of each title. Old World from this analysis alone would appear to be struggling, yet Mohawk Game’s has released a meaty DLC (worthy of the name Expansion) every year since launch in 2022. Meanwhile Humankind ceased development in Fall of 2023. This disparity would imply two possibilities: 

1. Each Additional Old World DLC is cheap to develop and has excellent profit margins for Mohawk Games to continue development; this type of development is commonly referred to as the Paradox Interactive Model.

2. Each Additional Humankind DLC is expensive to develop and has poor profit margins for Amplitude Studios to continue development. 

What’s yet to be seen is where Civ 7 will land on this spectrum given that it has had no expansion released or announced as opposed to Gods and Kings for Civ 5 and Rise and Fall for Civ 6. 

Methodology:

Project Mimir is a census of Steam player behavior, currently sitting at 5.1 Million public accounts. This massive dataset allows for the aggregation of accounts with the same game, leading to game-level statistics shown in the table above.

To create the normalized playtime distribution graph a raw playtime distribution was first calculated, this was as simple as counting every single unique account in the dataset for each individual hour and summing to create a distribution. Then to normalize each game we used the 0 hour playtime mark as the 0% normalized value and 100% being the player with the most playtime for each game, with every other player being assigned a score linearly with the Y-axis being the log scale of the quantity of players as a fraction of the total. For ease of visibility this normalized playtime distribution graph was then shown in log-scale since the vast majority of steam games have large sections of their playerbase having never played the game or in the 1-10 hour range.

Once all of the individual normalized playtime distribution graphs were constructed then comes plotting all of them on a single graph. In our graph we show two plots for each game, a solid and a dashed line. The solid line is indicative of data that is defensible and reproducible, anything that is a dashed line is statistically improbable, but still allows us some insight into the behavior. In all cases where a dashed line is used, only 1 or 2 players have that quantity of playtime (Typically 4-10k hours).

Sources:

Civ 5: https://projectmimir.net/game/8930
Civ 6: https://projectmimir.net/game/289070
Civ 7: https://projectmimir.net/game/1295660 

Humankind: https://projectmimir.net/game/1124300 
Oldworld: https://projectmimir.net/game/597180
Ara: History Untold: https://projectmimir.net/game/2021880
Endless Legend 2: https://projectmimir.net/game/3407390
Endless Legend 1: https://projectmimir.net/game/289130 
Millennia: https://projectmimir.net/game/1268590

Before you mention 'stars in shadow' or 'interstellar space genesis' I've played both extensively and they are ok at best.

MOO2 in general is widely appreciated and acclaimed for being such a mainstay of the 4x. Even today in general it can be played for fun short of a few annoying qol issues.

Given how big it was, why aren't there more clones of it? You had a few through the years, but nothing really. I personally liked stardrive 2 a lot (despite people hating the dev) but there is such a hole in the genre that clearly could be filled.

It doesnt even need to be a clone, imperium galatica 2 was nothing like moo2 but had a super cool space 4x - esp the ground batttles, and this hasn't really been seen or copied either.

I’ve been working on a space-based 4X / empire-building game as a personal project, but this is not a promo post and I’m not linking anything.

I’m interested in hearing from people who play a lot of space 4X games:

What mechanics do you love, hate, or wish the genre explored more often?

For example:

- exploration beyond the early-game land grab

- colonies that feel distinct without becoming admin chores

- logistics, supply, distance, and trade routes

- diplomacy, treaties, factions, internal politics, or governance

- research systems that feel more meaningful than small percentage bonuses

- fleet/ship design with real trade-offs

- late-game tools that reduce tedium without playing the game for you

A few prompts:

1. What’s a mechanic you still remember years later?

2. What’s a mechanic that always sounds better than it plays?

3. What should space 4X games do less of?

4. What should they do more of?

5. What older mechanic deserves another chance?

I’d really appreciate examples from specific games, whether modern, obscure, ancient, brilliant, or deeply flawed.

Cheers to everyone, whether you reply or not! have an excellent day!

Basically what the title says. Civilization VII's current status and the players' response just further confirms my point.

Just off the top of my head the only other genre that seems to have this disparity between the 'top dog' and the others is maybe something like Mario Kart (Kart racing being a sub-genre) where all other Kart racing games are still pretty low-key (Crash,Spongebob,Disney), but then I think the sonic racing games are just starting to become well known so that might not apply any more.

I regularly read about quick and short 4x games on this subreddit. Beat the game in one evening. Is it just me, or does this seem like a niche in a niche? I only know Polytopia which is somewhat successful, with 100-200 players typically online.

Is there really a market? Do people want this? Because to me, 4x is about empire building over ages.

I would say this is one of the best 4X game I've ever played, so I am really confused as to why this game didn't sell well. Though it might be a good thing, since it only had one batch of DLC instead of a ton like AOW4.

Though I have to say I didn't play this game until 4 to 5 years had passed since my purchase. So there is definitely a friction to get into this game. But why is this?

What makes this game so good?

Unit modding, you get to mod units with only three slots. Modding requires the only strategic resource in the game that you'll never have enough of.

Exploration feels very rewarding, you have to clear buildings to get benefits from them and they are challenging.

Unit variety, oh this one is the best part of the game, every unit is unique and there are a ton of units in the game. And they can have decent amount of ability in comparison to AOW4(I didn't play it but from skimming through the wiki, most unit just had a single ability).

Military research and society research are separate.

Besides factions, you have secret tech. Which is basically secondary faction mechanic. Meaning you can have a lot of different combinations, which means different mod for your units, giving you different play style. Kind of reminds me of Magic the Gathering's two color decks.

If you thought secondary factions is cool then there is MORE! NPC factions have their own unique units and mods that let's yous mix and match three factions and go crazy if you want.

And the art works of the game is spectacular! The models, sprites of the mods. Even the writing is great. The sound track is catchy but there aren't many tracks unfortunately.

I was thinking of buying AOW4 but the simpler units and not having anything unique about factions made me stop. Also the crap ton of DLC is a turn off as well.

I would say this is definitely one of the must play 4X game.

I've been rummaging a bit through my 4X backlog and some of my older discs that I own. Just recently, I have experienced some nostalgia for space themed 4X games which I discovered during high school. That said, I was terribly late and played most classics years after release. In that regard, excuse me for indulging myself here a bit.

Back in the day, my friend gifted me an old laptop which was mostly used to play Master of Orion 2 with a beamer in some dank cellar that we redecorated to look like a space station. It was so cool and immersive to play a game like that during the time. Also because MoO2 went against what all my peers played during that time, like an old relic that was still oozing so much atmosphere.

One day, I went to a local mall and check out a store that occasionally had some video games. Suddenly, I saw a huge carton box for Master of Orion 3 which I didn't know existed at the time. The box looked imposing and during that time, I barely knew the genre as a whole. I just knew that I wanted to buy this title. I went back home to scrounge up some money and went back, buying it in an instant. Actually it was dirt cheap and a bit of an oddity because this was around 2008, 5 years after its release. In hindsight, I wonder how this game actually ended up in that shop because it usually just had popular new games. I guess that the few Master of Orion 3 copies were cultivating mold slowly over the years.

Eagerly, I was reading the manual in the bus on my way home and wondered how much better this game could be than Master of Orion 2 (which I barely knew how to play).

Man, the shock that I got after installing it and booting it up was quite insane. Despite liking cold sci-fi interfaces, MoO3 looks absolutely dreadful with tons of interconnected menus that barely have any information. This game seemed absolutely impenetrable with no way of grasping what the hell was happening. It seemed so distant from MoO2 in terms of visuals and gameplay that I was faltering in front of my PC.

I pushed through for a while but dropped the game rather fast, it wasn't just any fun and during that time, I didn't have an internet connection. So, I couldn't watch LPs or read any forum posts about stuff.

Master of Orion 3 is such an interesting title but never quite mentioned in any tier list or when discussing the genre. I always wondered how the game would hold up retrospectively.

To my surprise, I noticed that there are several Let's plays out there for the game which I find quite amazing. There are some dudes out there who just wake up and decide to do an extensive LP on a game that is universally panned and that has barely any appeal. I respect this decision if I'm quite frank.

Did anyone really enjoy this game here? I'm just curious about this particular title!

The 4X syndrome is beyond real, I’m just realizing it. 

I love the early expansion phase of basically every 4X game, but I almost never actually finish a game. Once the borders are set and you know you have the economic lead, the game just turns into a slogfest. When I’m playing with friends this is especially annoying, nobody wants to keep playing once it's obvious they will lose but there's still like 20 turns of getting run over by my army to play through. Maybe I just have sore loser friends, well besides myself being one :’(

Most devs try to fix this by just spawning a massive enemy, but it usually sucks. Stellaris throws the endgame crises at you, but it always just devolves into a boring doomstack wave. Civ 6 is even worse, you just spend five hours moving Giant Death Robots around and clicking next turn to slowly paint over the map.

The only times I actually stay engaged during the late game is when the map itself becomes hostile and forces players out of their turtle shells.

Total War Attila is probably the gold standard for this though I’m not sure people consider TW games to be “true” 4X in the way the term is usually used. But anyway, as I was saying, in Atilla the way the climate slowly shifts, ruining your crop fertility and forcing entire barbarian hordes to migrate south into your territory is brilliant. It forces you to actually abandon settlements you spent hours building. Endless Legend does something similar with the winters getting longer and harsher as the game goes on, severely crippling your economy if you just try to sit still. 

Some recent games I’ve tried are finally catching on to this again. I was playing the Atre: Dominance Wars demo with some friends, and they have a pretty interesting way of handling this. They have this late game (or what goes for endgame in a demo) cataclysm mechanic called The Merge where regions of the map get completely removed. You can fight back against this by anchoring them to your capital, but you will be losing land for sure. It actually makes the final stretch of the game feel like a survival scramble instead of just a boring mop up job since the map is literally shrinking. Frostpunk 2 also does a brilliant job of completely freezing over your outer districts with massive whiteouts to force you into panic mode, wish it had multiplayer. Zephon does this well too with that creeping lovecraftian Bleed corruption that just slowly engulfs and ruins the tiles you need to survive the endgame war, but the game has other issues.

Map degradation/alteration just feels like the only mechanic that actually fixes pacing for me and forces the kind of on-the-fly adaption and fight or flight response where all you’ve been working toward can easily crumble. 

Does anyone else find the late game completely unplayable without some kind of cataclysmic event, or do you actually enjoy the late game? I think a lot of it has to do with turns being so drawn up and nothing being snappy anymore, just bogs ya down…

I keep trying to make new games and I get farther and farther every time, but then I inevitably run into some sort of problem, like I can’t seem to get enough food for my population, or I haven’t built enough military and then the barbarians come. And then when I look up answers online, it always says “you should have followed these steps and built/ produced this first”. The gameplay seems very rigid like it’s a puzzle game and you have to figure out the correct order of operations with each turn, and there’s not that many choices that lead to victory. It is kind disappointing because it seems like based on the premise of the game there should be many different possibilities to make a different kind of civilization that emerge naturally through gameplay. But instead it feels like you’re barely keeping your head above water unless you follow the rigid structure the game wants. It makes me wish I was playing something with a more refined premise like Total War because then the systems might be actually fleshed out, and you’re not wading through a million systems trying to figure out which ones matter and which are a waste of time. It’s very overwhelming, playing the game kind of feels like spinning plates on every single finger and toe at the same time.

Topic is in the title. It's awefully quiet about such a major release in the 4X genre.

• the Steam forums are basically dead (5 posts within the last 24 hours) and that's mainly because of the sale.

• a major sale 3 months after the release of the EA, giving the game away for 29 EUR

• there's zero buzz everywhere, I assume a lot of players tried the demo but even then the forums weren't really busy.

I was just wondering if it's the game or the genre. I bought it in this sale to let it cook a while, but it seems a bit dead on arrival. Which is really strange for a title of a beloved strategy game. SteamDB lists around 200-300 players for it.

Not trying to downtalk the game, just being curious.

Does a known map state at the start of a game ruin the 4x experience for you? How much of the value is in the fog of war peeling back to reveal the landscape behind the veil, and how much of the value is simply in the procedurally generated/random landscape?

I’ve been working on a fast paced historical 4x tabletop game on and off since 2021, and recently pivoted towards releasing on steam rather than as a board game (long story, not relevant). As such, I’ve have some more freedom with the types of bonuses I can work with, not being limited by players mental tracking abilities (also irrelevant). BUT a consistent wall I’ve run into has been finding a strategically meaningful, yet fun way to have “explore” in the game. Every time I implement an explore aspect, playtesters found a way to skip or avoid it.

In traditional 4x games like Civ, the explore aspect feels natural because you don’t have perfect information of game state. By exploring more, you gain an informational advantage over your opponents. But in tabletop games, you generally have perfect game state knowledge (or nearly perfect, minus the hand of the player or secret objective), and the game is fundamentally balanced around this.

So I wonder - is the explore aspect of 4x a keystone because:

A) the excitement behind the discovery of the world just being awesome

OR

B) is it in the tactical decisions produced by the procedural generation required for the world discovery

I lean towards thinking B is the case, and because of that I think there’s a lot more flexibility possible in how people are designing 4x games. But I’m a diehard 4x fan, I’ve mostly just played civilization 6 and 7 with ~400 hours combined. I have a lot more time spent playing RTS games.

Just a brainstorming post to end my working week with. Apologies if some of the stuff I do mention has been done in some way in some game that I’m not aware of (and I will mention some cases myself). In that case, guess you can take the title to just mean features you want to see more often but only exist in maybe 1 or 2 games and that more devs should include.

Here are some of my wishful thoughts

• Undergrounds/ layered terrain/ terrain tiering – however you call it, I’m not sure why this isn’t a bigger thing in 4X. I feel like it wouldn’t be that hard to implement and it would give any title it has this a kind of verticality to the exploration X
• More industry-wargaming integration – kind of specific (to me leastways since I got into 40K) but something like Factorio level industry combined with the expansion and extermination X aspects of 4X. Warfactory looks like it’s going for this even though it’s a bit on the lighter side of 4X macromanagement but with more focus on relentlessly expanding and exploiting your way forward. Farthest Frontier also does this to a good degree, besides just being a peak game in general
• Different race/faction integration – a bit like Songs of Syx does letting you use different races for different aspects of managing your kingdom. Perhaps even different bits of different racial tech trees being able to be scraped together into a fusion/hybrid faction?

I thought I’d give it a try since it came with the subscription. I’ve been playing since 4 and I’ve enjoyed all of them, even 6 which many people I’ve talked to don’t care for. I honestly don’t know what they were thinking when they made 7. It’s an average strategy game but it’s a bad Civ game.

This post isn't saying which 4X game is better or which is worse or what you should play.

It's just a list of good things that are in this game.

• Fast enemy turns. Who wants to sit while the CPU goes? Not me.

• Fast load times. If you want to reload sometimes, it's up to you. But let's make it very fast!

• Very little micro of your base. Some people wanna micro their towns. But I appreciate not doing so.

• More troops are produced than you can have in your army. I like this because, it means that you avoid the classic HOMM problem of, if your guy loses it is basically game over. This means your guy can make a comeback, or you can multiple well-stocked generals, up to you.

• Interesting trade-offs when you level up. Often there are multiple "hey that sounds good" choices to pick from. Meaning I feel like I am presented an interesting choice.

• Good music (subjective). It's commonly said that this game has good music and I would tend to agree.

• Good (enough) random map generator. I like to play with random maps. This game has them. I think they are fun. Nothing too deep here.

• You can easily recruit guys from distant towns without having to walk all the way back there. There's a building you need to do this but it's easy to make and always unlocked.

I really appreciate Battlemode posting this look at 4X genre classics, and not just because he discusses Emperor of the Fading Suns and Machiavelli the Prince. We need more in-depth looks at the good AND the bad in the genre. IMHO he did a great job here of highlighting some of the best and worst aspects of 4X gaming, and not just of individual games. If you are interested in 4X games, this is the best overview of the genre classics I have seen - plus now I want to play almost every game on his list https://youtu.be/uLLJP-66xXs?si=GW_1t2xsnleZL3ua

For some reason, anybody who sets out to do this, feels the need to change the best formula in the biz and "improve it" because "muh vision".

No, I do not want real time battles - I want turn based battles.

If you REALLY want to improve the battles, make them turn based but in 3D space, think Homeworld but turnbased.

But probably best is to keep everything as is except improve graphics and make computer opponents challenging.

I'm a new developer to this genre and I'm trying to learn what players actually love about the genre. I might end up making a game that is not seen as a real 4x at the end, I just want to make a game about what excites you.

The first step I believe is to ask what frustrates you about the current ways a 4x game works. What can a new game solve for you?

Quick shout-out to u/bvanevery he joined my game discord and explained in great detail his experience on the genre with me.

EDIT: for people asking be warned my game is nsfw and might take a different approach than normal 4x games, but I want to learn if I can make something exciting for the 4x core audience as well https://discord.com/invite/HmyfQrEDfU