Slitherine

Introduction

As many readers already know, 4x is game industry jargon for "eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate." It refers to a sort of freeform empire building game where players explore the map, expand population and territory, exploit resources found to produce structures and military units, and ultimately exterminate all opposition. Examples of turn based 4x games would be Reach for the Stars, Sword of Aragon, Civilization, Master of Orion, Colonization, Master of Magic, Alpha Centauri, and Birth of the Federation. I love these games, and if sales figures are any indication, so does a large chunk of the gaming public. It is no accident that Civilization and its many, many sequels and spinoffs has been the most popular series in computer gaming history.

Many people have referred to Slitherine's games, like Spartan, as being examples of the 4x genre. While Spartan certainly has a similar feel, it is not truly 4x. It is an empire building game, and it certainly does make use of the familiar eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate elements. There is, however, no meaningful eXploration. Thus the title of this thread; Spartan is a 3x game, not 4x.

This is not neccessarily a bad thing, I feel it was a completely appropriate choice for Spartan. Spartan is a historical game based on historical factional groupings and a more or less historically accurate map. Under these conditions, trying to keep the map hidden from players is rather pointless.

Slitherine's primary competition for the Spartan and Legion series of games is clearly Creative Assembly's Rome: Total war. R:TW does indeed try to include an exploration element, large areas of the strategic map are blacked out until explored. While this has some effect on fog of war and diplomacy, it ultimately feels lame. The game comes with a large printed wall poster of the map, after all; its not as though players can be kept literally "in the dark". When I played R:TW I found myself constantly referring to my paper map, and lamenting the poor design choice that made me do so.

This post is getting too long already, let me come to the point. It should be possible to create a historically accurate empire building game that does have a meaningful exploration element. There are precious few games on the market that actually do this successfully. I would like to see Slitherine create one.

There was a merchant game a while ago that did it in a very cool way. There was a hand drawn map that gave an estimate of the land, city positions etc, but as you discovered it filled it in with the real world objects & these deviated slightly from your map. Not sure we'd want to try that but it was a nice attempt at it. I think they deviated more the further away they were.

Case study: Colonization

Sid Meier has a well deserved reputation as perhaps the greatest computer game designer of all time. I've played the daylights out of several games he has worked on, most notably Railroad Tycoon and Civilization. My all time favorite Sid Meier game, however, is a lesser known title: Colonization.

When released, Colonization was generally described as a sequel to Civilization. This is only true in that both are 4x games. Actually Colonization was a substantially different game with very different mechanics and subtly different goals.

For the purposes of this thread's topic, what is interesting about Colonization is that it is a more or less historically accurate 4x game that includes a meaningful exploration element.

The point is that the early settlers in the new world did not know much about the land they were colonizing. At best, they had a general idea of the Eastern coastline. Expansion required exploration into the interior, area that was genuinely "terra incognita" when the first settlers arrived. In the real world, about 400 years passed between Columbus' initial discovery and the complete exploration of the Americas.

Colonization does a wonderful job of simulating this exploration process. The player starts with a ship off the Atlantic coast with no knowledge of the landscape whatsover. His first few turns consists of sailing West until he finds land, exploring up and down the coastline a turn or two looking for a likely spot, and then unloading his first colonists. These colonists found a colony, hopefully multiply and prosper, and eventually send out explorers to find new sites to launch secondary colonies.

The game has an option to play on a historical map of the actual terrain of North and South America as we know it now. Its a bit stretched out of shape due to the limits of the game's square grid, but nevertheless quite recognizable. The game's replay value is greatly enhanced, however, by the player's ability to select the random map option and play on a landscape that is truly unknown.

I have spent literally hundreds of hours playing this masterpiece. In terms of playing time per dollar spent, this game is one of the most cost effective entertainment purchases I have ever made.

Yet, much as I like it, it didn't sell well. Why? Is this a sign that exploration themes are a bad idea?

1) Colonization is ultimately a game primarily about American history, and as such mainly of interest to Americans. I believe the game did not or at least was expected to not sell well outside the United States.

2) Colonization has a very intricate economic model that requires a lot of micromanagement to optimize. This suits me fine (I have spent hundreds of hours playing Capitalism 1 and 2). But I suspect it turned off many 4x gamers who wanted to jump into the expand and exterminate themes and found the attention they had to give to training, building and labor allocation annoying.

3) Colonization is a bit graphically primitive. It doesn't have the "eye candy" appeal that game companies work so hard to capture these days.

4) The biggest reason for poor sales was probably competition from other Microprose 4x titles. Colonization had the poor timing to be released within a year of three of gaming history's best ever 4x games: Master of Magic, Civilization 2, and Master of Orion. Civ 2 and MoO 2 were huge hits. MoM is a bit more obscure, but apparently because of another accident of timing: shortly after MoM was sent to the printers Microprose acquired the license from Wizards of the Coast for a computer version of the enormously popular Magic: the Gathering collectible card game. Microprose apparently decided the two games were too thematically similar to be worthwhile developing seperately, and as the MtG license was expected to generate huge sales, support for MoM was quietly dropped. It is quite likely WotC pressured them to do so as part of the licensing agreement. Thus colonization faced competition for external sales, and more importantly, internal Microprose development and marketing resources, from three other titles, all actual or expected megahits. With the limitations mentioned above, it didn't quite have the luster to succeeed in this competition.

I want to make the point that Slitherine is well placed to overcome some of the disadvantages that beset Colonization. Slitherine's games' tactical combat views offer "eye candy" of a quality that was barely even dreamed of in the days Colonization was released. The economic model in Spartan, to me a good compromise; it's complex enough to be more interesting than say, Civilization, without being the micromanagement nightmare some players feel Colonization is. And as for competition...well, Spartan is the best empire building game I've played since Birth of the Federation. The industry is ripe for a big 4x hit, and a true 4x expansion of the Spartan/Legion system may very well become that hit.

I've found this download site for old Colonization game:
Colonization download