How To Make A Better Strategy Game: 4X Edition

III. Make Things A Big Deal

When you’re developing an empire/massive thing/whatever, it’s incredibly easy to get bogged down in details. It’s easy to lose the signal amongst all the noise. Developers need to stop being so polite and delegating major events to minor notifications in your tray or little blobs in a corner. Assume the full screen when something good or bad happens, make it a huge deal. Civilization has gotten this down to a beat when it dims out screens when a big event occurs…

…or by preventing you from taking your next turn before you make a major decision.

There is some contingent of vocal PC gamers that believe this is hand-holding, some “console-ization” of their games to make them easier for peons to get into. That is bullshit. World leaders receive summaries on the world around them because they need to be kept in touch at all times to make effective decisions. Somehow, they’ve coaxed a new generation of designers into building iterative spreadsheets. No, this is wrong. Furthermore, it puts you as the ruler in a vacuum. Your civilization/empire/power blob should rely on you to expand as much as you rely on it. Why should any ruler feel lonely? They shouldn’t. Games shouldn’t be perpetuating this notion. Then you get the strange instance, like the following in Endless Space, where it’s half-assed:

Have you ever gone to a store and received just absolutely terrible customer service? The prompt is in my face, it’s letting me know I need to do something, but rather than send me straight to the Research panel, it tells me to do it myself? This is condescending design and you shouldn’t be punished by your game just by playing it. If you’re going to prompt, don’t be snarky about it. Some other examples:

The other players in the game may be just as big or bigger than you are and unless you’re blowing them down like they’re confetti stands, a 4X game should remind you of how important they are to your operation.

Research notification is the worst. The worst. Your empire is advancing, you’re researching all of these incredible new abilities, skills, and powers, but in a pure ‘this is a variable that will X and Y another variable’, they often provide little information about what they do or why they’re important. I don’t know what the hell Heavy Ultra Blasters are, how are they better than the previous ones? Explain this. Don’t delegate this information to a mere notification blip.

IV. Tuck Away The Details

So you’re an indie developer (not to pick on you, but you’re definitely the guiltiest) you’ve just made a 4X game and you’ve loaded it with all kinds of content and it’s super massive and all that, but the last thing you should do is dump all that on your player. Details are very cool to have and it’s reassuring to know that your game will, perhaps, last the test of time because of the sheer amount of content packed in, but take the urge and sock it. In the example above, you’re supposed to make heads or tails of what’s the optimal tech path by, well, trying to absorb it all at once. It’s a very pretty diagram and I know it was probably an incredible Vizio file that you showed your friends while you were making the game, but it’s terrible design. Hide your details, like Civilization does:

From the main map, when prompted for research, you’re given a handful of categories and the game explains why you should pick one over another, dog-earring ones that will provide specific benefits to your empire. If you want to see all the greasy, grimy details, they’re just a click away. If Civilization presented a full tech tree to start, it would make me want to die, like so many 4X games do. Another incredible example of being bashed upside the head is StarDrive:

StarDrive wants to have its cake and eat it by presenting not just race selection, but the ability to modify my race with tons of other information from the start. Why? Why? It may be fifteen years old, but Master of Orion 2 showed us exactly how it should be done:

Yes, games can be very game-y, but keep it in your pants.

V. Be Fun

This seems to be easy enough, but it also seems incredibly difficult for some to master. Your players are not dogs: you cannot set a box of chew toys in front of them and expect them to latch on. Your 4X game doesn’t need to languish in obscurity if you simply present it better. You’ll notice that I focused almost entirely on presentation and that’s for a very good reason: many developers get the mechanics down, then flub up in trying to show it off to the world, which not only cripples how it plays, but it cripples your sales as well. A game like Civilization sells millions not just because it’s got Sid Meier’s name and a big Civilization wordmark on it (although that helps), but in how it’s presented. You can criticize it for holding your hand or you can praise it for its depth, which it absolutely has. This doesn’t need to be an either/or affair. Your game can be sophisticated, but it should also be charming. When you can get that down, you’ll start making games people want to play. You’ll also impress me, which is the most important thing.