Hey all,

I’ve been looking to make this post for quite a long, long time, but until recently it just hasn’t felt right. This post will detail the design philosophy behind the current CivEx. It will offer a view of how I see the Civ “game,” and what I think are worthwhile uses of dev resources. Fair warning, this is a heavy game theory post. If you aren't interested in that, skip to the end for a short progress update.

Overall, CivEx is meant to be an expansion on the basic Civ formula. Personally, I’ve played on the basic Civ formula for years, and it now seems boring and one-dimensional. The new CivEx is meant to be a stronger foundation on which to develop an improved Civ formula, that encourages players to both compete and cooperate, as well as make more interesting decisions when playing.

Economy and Trade

The vast majority of work done on CivEx has been tied to the game’s economy. These are aspects of the server that must come first as they are very hard to change later. We’ll be launching First Light with these changes to make sure they have the proper effect, and to be able to note any significant changes needed for 4.0.

The Civ economy revolves around producing materials to protect and attack nations. This means that, from the get-go, I have two strings to pull when I’m looking to give players meaningful choices here. I can improve how players gain those resources, and how they invest them in order to fulfill those two basic points.

For the first part, we now have more ores in the game. These are used in advanced crafting and in new armor and tool sets above diamond. Multiple ores are found per region, in three different levels of density and rarity. Regions are not balanced, and some are clearly superior to others. However, to get all the rare resources you need you will still have to travel to multiple regions across the map. I’ve also added an interesting dynamic with our resource placement that I’m interested to see if it’s worth pursuing further: Vault builders will require mass amounts of iron, while casual players will find more iron than they need due to its prevalence across the world. Hopefully this should get some power players thinking about trading valuables or protection with casual players for their excess iron. With the introduction of luck potions for mining and multiple new enchantments dedicated to resource acquisition, I’m interested to see how players adjust their playstyle.

For the second part, we have completely changed how players will enchant items and produce potions. Enchanting uses our new system where a lot more thought has to be put in to item crafting, and players now have a lot more agency in appraising their items and trading them with other players. The range of enchants that can be considered valuable is now far wider, and the difficulty in getting top-tier enchants has been increased. There is also more resource cost and compared with exp cost to enchanting. With over 40 new enchantments offering new PvP, PvE, and resource harvesting options, this should have a serious impact on your gameplay experience.

Potion crafting uses our new Alchemy plugin, which completely changes how potions are made. Players will kill mobs for special alchemy items used in potion crafting (there are many). They can use trial and error to refine the recipes they are originally given, and to determine if other ingredients can be used as alternatives for the same recipe. There are a handful of new potions, including combo potions, extended speed 2, and luck potions which provide 20% more ore finds. This presents interesting opportunities due to the information imbalance (e.g. you may discover that a somewhat common item without a known use can be used to make powerful potions, and attempt to buy out the market, then sell potions to other players).

Land value and Territory Control

Land value and territory control is something I’ve wanted to influence, but ultimately has to wait. For now, we have new changes to ore generation and regional mob spawning, as well as Fracture portals to influence player settlement. There’s something interesting stuff we’ve been thinking about for creating a good territory control system on a Civ server, but it isn’t a priority yet. This will likely be the focus of our first or second content update, but we will have to see how feasible our ideas are first.

Defense, infrastructure, and curbing the “raider” playstyle

In general, I want to increase the amount of advantage players have for investing time and resources on the server. The power ceiling in-game for weapons and gear is now much higher, and the cost curve is far better (less linear) than vanilla. I’m being careful not to go too overboard with this, because player skill still needs to be a deciding factor in open combat. The new enchantments and Crimson armor definitely won’t let casual players beat seasoned veterans on the open field, but it should let your “decent” 5 or 6/10 player go toe to toe with an “undergeared” p4 dia 8/10 pvp monster who joined last week.

CivEx absolutely needs raiders to be a fun server, but at every step of the way I want to incentivize them to be “Conquerors” rather than “people who live in a hole in the ground, get max gear in a week, and only log in to kill people”. People who want to raid on CivEx are going to have to interact with our new systems, which means they will be disadvantaged by completely isolating themselves. Whether this disadvantage causes them to try subjugating other players into tributaries, offering protection from other raiders in exchange for resources and infrastructure, or creating real nations and alliances themselves, I don’t really care. All of these are valid contributions to the server and make it a more fun, interesting, and dynamic place to play.

In the future, I want to add new kinds of static defenses to CivEx. I also believe that any new defenses or territory control added to CivEx should not be countered simply by “time*manpower spent left clicking” as in Citadel and Bastion, but instead should be countered by some time investment augmented by a large, consumable resource investment. I want dug-in, established nations to feel that they can only be sieged by another dug-in, established nation with the resources to do so.

Dynamic World, Content Updates, and In-Game Events

The world of CivEx is meant to feel like a living, breathing world. The world is divided into Regions, areas with unique names that have different resources, mobs, and scenery. Crossing a region border will give you a message telling you what region you’ve entered.

We don’t want CivEx to be some static server. We want to do content updates and expansions so players feel that we have an evolving, improving game, and that our server has a future. We want players to stay excited about playing on CivEx, and we want to bring back old players every few months to try out new content.

Likewise, we want to introduce in-game events to bring in the new content. To give an example of what I’m talking about:

New fracture portals won’t just appear randomly. For example, they may be “constructed” by cultists to bring in new enemies, heralding the return of their sleeping Lovecraftian deity, and the first players to challenge them will be the first to gather their new resources.

In many ways, the staff team are the DMs of a massive campaign. Instead of dropping content in randomly, it will be introduced by world-shaking events, and players who participate will have a chance to get a head start. While I want to be influenced by the way Sov ran events, I definitely want to be careful to not repeat some of the mistakes they did. We’re not going to be picking and choosing winners, instead will offer objectives and encourage players to pit themselves against others to win them.

Conclusion and Progress

So, there you have it. This is what I’ve looked at while planning out CivEx, and what I will be looking at when making new content. In short, if you’re a player who wants to see more “Civilization” on their Civ server, wants refreshing overhauls, and would like to see a server that has hope for future content additions, CivEx is the right place for you.

As for progress, right now i’m trudging through spreadsheets filled with Alchemy information. Currently we have just under a hundred unique alchemy resources (though I expect to have more by the time I finish, as there are still some holes to fill). These drops will be spread out among our 50-odd mobs, and each drop has its own mixture of hidden point values used in Alchemy crafting. More powerful mobs will not only drop more items, but also drop rarer, more potent items as well.

What I’m working on now is planning out a good distribution of aspects in my drops, and a good distribution of drops in my mobs. This needs to be done to avoid locking players in to needing a handful of items to brew important potions. After that I’ll need to take our spreadsheets and write them into our configs, before double checking our mob spawn charts to make sure everything’s in order before finally crossing mythicmobs off the list. Alchemy itself still needs the potion recipes redone after some overhaul on how aspects are distributed throughout the world, and then that will be done too. Those are the two largest remaining chunks of work for CivEx. The next post will include the finalized feature list, which will give you a quick rundown of all the changes on CivEx.