Soren Johnson has again published a blog post about the development work in Old World, this time about the end of the game. He describes the thoughts which went into the ambition system, the relationship to a role-playing AI, and how to make each game more dynamic and unique.

An excerpt:

“Of course, one might ask, wouldn’t the player lose if the AI fulfills their ten ambitions first? Well, they would if the AI actually got ambitions, but I knew that would be a mistake. One of the other problems with specialized victory conditions is that because they either measure internal progress (cultural or scientific victory) or something orthogonal to most of the game (religious or even diplomatic victory), an AI victory can come as a sudden surprise. I was sure of one thing above all – a surprise ending to a 20-hour 4X game is not a good ending. Without ambition victories, the AI would clearly be playing a different game from the human, which meant that Old World would be an asymmetrical game. In reality, it just meant that we were admitting that the game was asymmetrical because there is no such thing as a symmetrical 4X game. The genre likes to pretend that it’s symmetrical, like chess or most board games, but a single-player 4X always orbits the human.“

Read the whole blog post here: https://www.designer-notes.com/?p=1748

Discuss his blog post in our forum here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/old-world-designer-notes-11-soren-johnson-on-the-game-end.673707/