Knowing history: Behind Civ 5's Brave New World

"Even though you don't think of, say, Indonesia, as a big video game outlet and consumer market, the country is huge now," says Beach. "More and more places like Indonesia and Brazil, you just can't ignore how important their growth is here in the 21st century."

And so, Indonesia and Brazil. Check. Zulu and Morocco, check. Five to go.

The next question, says Beach, is: "How can we take a civ and make it into an interesting gameplay experience?"

Enter Portugal, Poland, Assyria, the Shoshone and the Venetians.

"Portugal ... doesn't meet the geographic diversity requirement, because Europe was already heavily represented, but it's a fan favorite," says Strenger. "It's been requested for a long time, it's been in previous Civ expansions like Civ 4 and they were historically this awesome trading empire. Here we are adding this awesome trading system. That lends itself really easily to creating this cool trading-oriented civ. That was one of our earlier additions."

One of the new gameplay mechanics in BNW is an enhanced trading system, with cargo ships and caravans. You can send these units to neighboring cities for an influx of cash and an exchange of science and religion bonuses. And they can be plundered, unlike the nebulous "trades" accessed via the diplomacy screens. New technologies unlock additional trade routes, making focusing on an economic civilization both more challenging and more interesting.

Poland, as well, taps into the new gameplay mechanics, granting players additional social policies which, when paired with BNW's enhanced policy system, grant the player the ability to make the civilization into practically any kind of power they want.

"Poland is set up to be a jack of all trades," says Beach. "You can start a game as Poland and you can react to who else you encounter. If Genghis and some of those other guys are in the game, you can take honor and defend against them, or maybe I don't go the military path to win the game and outrace them some other way."

"We kind of do look toward the endpoints of the game in terms of, are they going to try to win diplomatically? Are they going to try to win culturally? Historically, which one makes the most sense?" says Strenger. "The traits and the unique units and buildings that we end up designing for them from historical context, what do those lend themselves to?"

Once the designers settle on civs, the art team steps in. Models for special units, buildings and wonders have to be created or modified from existing game pieces, but the most visible visual element of a new civilization has to be created from scratch: its leader.

In Civilization, interacting diplomatically with a civilization means dealing with its leader. In Civ 5, those leaders appear in very detailed 3D settings with dramatic lighting and full-polygonal animation. These scenes are easily the most graphically intensive parts of the game, and the art and animation teams put as much care into them as if the game depended on them.

"The first thing we do with a leader, we get together and talk about him," says Brian Busatti, a senior artist at Firaxis. "We talk about his characteristics, how he's going to play, how the AI is going to play, the personality. We go from there as we start the concept phase."

"The people who are the best actors are close enough to the range we want them to be, but sometimes they might have a higher voice or a lower voice," says Kim. "It all affects the way we want to animate them. We can't animate somebody who's talking really high, even though he's supposed to be really angry. ... One of the people who was doing the voice acting, we were trying to push him to be angry. We were like, 'Come on, be more angry!' Because we had these hate poses ... and he was like ... the leader that he knows, he doesn't get angry. He's a very docile, very humble person. But we're like, 'We need him to be more angry!'"

For the Pueblo civ, Firaxis reached out to the modern descendants of the ancient Native American Pueblo nation, and the tribe's current leadership council. It wanted their help in studying the civ and capturing their language in video game form. They refused.

What are collectively called "the Pueblo" are actually a loose collection of various Native American tribes, each with certain similarities. Language, however, is not one of them. Like many ancient cultures, the Pueblo's language varies from region to region and tribe to tribe. The Hopi, for example, traditionally speak Uto-Aztecan, a language itself formed from an amalgam of multiple languages with its roots in the joining of the Ute language with that of the Aztecs.

Firaxis was willing to consult with the Pueblo Council to determine the most realistic way of portraying the Pueblo civ, but the Pueblos drew a hard line at the language. To the Pueblo people, their language is sacred. They viewed inclusion of the language in a video game as a form of desecration, similar to how many native people do not wish to be photographed.

Out of respect for the ancient culture and its elders, Firaxis cancelled the Pueblo civ and turned its attention to the Shoshone.

"I knew that I was going to do a western North American tribe, and one of the things I wanted to stay away from was overlapping with the Zulu, who were ... perceived as natives, aggressive natives," says Lewis. "The Sioux fall into that same bucket. That's why, initially ... I wanted to have another civ that was sort of like a native that was more peaceful, which is where the Pueblo fit in very well. Here are the natives, but they interact with you very differently. The Pueblo would be a more spiritual, religious Western civ. When that got axed, we moved on to the Shoshone, and it was like ... We wanted them to be strong and proud, but we didn't want them to be just guys with spears."

Unfortunately, out of all the Native American tribes, the Shoshone proved the hardest to research. Beach and Lewis scoured the country for texts or exhibits, but kept coming up blank.

"I could find Encyclopedia of the American West," says Beach, "books like that, that are broad overviews of the entire American West, and you could find them in the index and there would be 10- or 15-page sections on them, but you could find Comanche, Sioux, whatever ... everyone else was covered in their bookstore. There was nothing on the Shoshone themselves."

One of the few things Firaxis knew about the culture was its ties to the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, through noted pathfinder Sacajawea. Firaxis considered making Sacajawea the "leader" of its Shoshone civ, but ultimately rejected the notion for historical reasons.

"With 43 civs, a bunch of us have visited a lot of these places, but we haven't visited all of them. We have to come up with tools and tricks to make sure that we respect the actual leaders that [the citizens of modern nations] feel are important and we get that right. Looking at things like who's on their currency, who's on their stamps, who they have statues of in their public places ... we actually do look at all that stuff. That's a really good way to make sure we get it right, in terms of representing each culture with the icons and units and buildings and stuff that they would feel good about being represented by."

When researching the Korean civ, Firaxis leaned on publisher 2K's presence in South Korea.

"When they heard that we were going to do Korea, they were like, 'Do it right,'" says Beach. "That was one of the few civs where we had to send out trial balloons."

The team settled on the 15th century ruler Sejong the Great, a popular, pre-modern figure they felt that most Koreans would feel comfortable with and who would be far removed from political disagreements that have divided the Asian nation since the mid-20th century.

"That was kind of the great simplification," says Beach. "Going back and doing a Renaissance-era leader who governed the whole united peninsula of Korea and helped establish their language and everything like that. Once we settled on who we were going to have as the leader there, it was clear that that disentangled us from any potential modern-day issues. It was a good way to go."

The selection of Enrico Dandolo as the leader of the Venetians may not be entirely free from modern political or cultural entanglements. As it turns out, his impact reaches into the modern day owing to his treatment of one of the great holy cities of the world.

"When [Dandolo] led the Crusaders ... he charged them money to stay [in Venice]," says Lewis, "and they had to pay back their debt. He said, 'OK, you can help me by taking Constantinople.' At the time I believe he was 83, he was blind and he led the fight to take Constantinople. They were the first ... everybody knows about 1453 when the Turks sacked Constantinople, but it was actually sacked by the Venetians a hundred years earlier, in the Fourth Crusade."

While the Brave New World expansion brings a lot of new features to the Civ table (trade routes, the World Congress, culture and ideology enhancements, etc.), it is always the new civs that get the most attention. Firaxis knows this, which is why it decided to take some risk with BNW's new batch of civs.

"The trickiest thing recently has been trying to differentiate from what's already there," says Beach. "Because we're warping the play style a little bit further than we used to ... you can get a sense that a second expansion, 43 civs in ... we definitely had to push the envelope a little bit more this time to come up with play styles for everybody. It's fun and exciting, too, that we had to do that, because now we've pushed ourselves to come up with some very unusual ways to play the game and then put that into the nine civs that are here."

Firaxis conducts multiple rounds of playtesting with new features and civs, but the challenge it faced with the new civs in BNW was teaching the playtesters how to approach them before they could test them out.

"First we had to get our testing group up to speed on how to even play Venice," says Beach. "Then, once they felt comfortable with it, they could start to judge that. So we had to be careful not to treat the early results, to overweigh them. We had to wait until everybody got comfortable with it."

The final proof, says Shirk, will be in how well it plays in the hands of the fans.

"We think people are going to have a lot of fun with Venice in particular," Shirk says. "Aside from the unique way of playing Shoshone, Venice just changes the way that you play. It's going to be fascinating to a lot of players. We always have a sense, in terms of exploits, things like that, because it's all within the family of playing through a normal game. This one is going to be kind of a wild card."

Beach says that if there's anything left over that he might have wanted to include in Civ V, after a full game and two expansions, it would be the ability to zoom out to reveal a globe-shaped world (a feature lost when Civ moved to a custom game engine) and the ability to terraform. The original design for the Dutch civ called for them to be able to reclaim land from the sea, but this proved to be impossible within Civ V's existing game engine.

"That's a little tip of the iceberg for what was left here. There are so many places to go," Beach says, hinting, perhaps, at what fans might be able to expect from an as yet unannounced (or even acknowledged) Civ 6.

As for Civ 5, Firaxis is confident that, after seven full years, it's put the game to bed as finally and completely as it could have.

"If you look at Civ 4, it's still getting played ... Civ 3 is still getting played. It's a model that makes sense," Beach says. "Part of the strength of the community is the way that, even once we wrap up working on one, they know it's going to have been brought forward over many years of gestation, and it's going to be in a really solid place.

"[Fans are] going to be happy sitting with [Civ 5] for a couple of years until the next one is ready to roll out."