Millennia - 4X Civ Like published by Paradox

[Syt]

Might as well start a proper thread now.

[Syt]

First Dev Diary:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/developer-diary/millennia-announcement.1599581/

Hello, everyone!

We're excited to present the first Dev Diary for Millennia.

In this, we'll talk a little about the vision and features for the game and also about
us, C Prompt Games. You can expect additional Diaries that go into more detail on
various features and the thought behind them in the coming months, leading up to
our release next year. If you like what you see, you can wishlist the game right
now!


C Prompt Games

Before we get rolling, we should say a few words about who we are.

C Prompt Games was formed by experienced strategy developers who have worked together on some of your favorite stuff. We are probably most known for our work on the Age of Empires franchise.

We love working in smaller teams – there are around twenty people on Millennia currently. Our office is in Colorado, but we are organized to support hybrid remote / in-office development and the team is in numerous other locations, including Texas, New Mexico, and Oregon.

At our core, we are life-long hardcore strategy gamers and we have basically wanted to make a 4X since forever. We started Millennia in 2019 -- it is definitely a labor of love and we are very excited to start being able to share it with you.


What's This?

If you haven't seen anything else about the game, Millennia is a new turn-based 4X that features alternate history, custom tech trees, and deep economy and combat.

We have carried the concept of Millennia around for a long time (please note my intentional avoidance of a pun there). That is fairly typical of our process. We tend to have a lot of rough game directions percolating and these get worked on here and there until we feel like it is the right time for one of them.

In the case of Millennia, a few things motivated us to make this our next game:

As strategy game developers, 4X is a cornerstone of the entire genre. It's something we love and something we want to work on. (Designing alongside Bruce Shelley while at Ensemble certainly provided some motivation in this direction.)

As strategy game players, we saw 4X as receiving less attention than it deserved. To us, the amount of obvious player interest was far greater than the number of games being provided and amount of new gameplay being explored. Certainly, we personally wanted more 4X games and we had talked to a lot of fans who felt the same way.

Shortly after we started to flesh out the systems that would become the pillars of Millennia, we really felt the spark. Not only did we see how things could fit together, but we also started to see something unique, something we really wanted to play ourselves. (The Age model in particular quickly developed into something that everyone saw potential in and was excited about.)

During the early stages of development, C Prompt shared a prototype of Millennia with our friends at Paradox and happily discovered agreement on those motivations.


Vision

4X is a large genre and can support a lot of different experiences. One of the experiences we felt had been overlooked was that of player authorship, of feeling like you're the one writing the story. When we played, we often felt less like we were leading a nation and more like we were trying to remember boardgame rules.

So, from a very high level, one of our goals was to steer in the direction of more open-ended, systems-based gameplay - to deliver a feeling of being the guiding spirit of a nation.

First and foremost, that direction informs a lot of our decisions.

A key innovation in Millennia is the Age-based design.

There are ten Ages in a "normal" game, ranging from the Stone Age to the near-future. Each Age provides the experience of the Age – the Iron Age has Iron Age technologies, Iron Age units, Iron Age buildings, and rules specific to the conditions of the Iron Age.

If you keep things within "normal" parameters, you might progress through 10 "standard" Ages, each delivering historical gameplay.

However, Millennia allows history to go off the rails. If you make some different decisions, you might steer your timeline into alternate Ages. These Ages are still historically themed, but explore some "what-if" territory. The Age of Aether is based on a history where the internal combustion engine doesn't come about as soon as it did and steam-power develops further. The Age of Blood is based on a war raging out of control and spreading across the world.

Ultimately, most of the things you have to use in a game come from the Ages, so you can end up with very, very different scenarios depending on the specific history and alternate history you timeline moves through.

Millennia features a system called "National Spirits."

Think of National Spirits as "things a nation can be famous for." Are your people known as great engineers? Is one of your major cities seen as the center of global banking? Does the world fear your unbeatable warriors?

Mechanically, each National Spirt is a technology tree. You get to pick National Spirits from a set at different points in a game. Doing so makes the technologies of the National Spirit available to you.

Through National Spirits, you get customize your Nation, to decide what you will be famous for, during the course of the game.

Economy and combat are key to Millennia.

As you lead your nation, you'll need to design the right economy for your strategy. Not all resources in Millennia are the same. Cutting down trees for Logs can provide Production, much like mining Copper. However, with the right Improvements, you can create a chain where your Logs are made into Paper which is then made into Books, getting you Knowledge (or Religion or Government or Wealth) instead of Production.

Some resources are (like the Logs) broad and capable of steering into a variety of different Goods while others are more focused and less flexible. How you decide to structure your economy has an impact on your capabilities and your ability to respond to changing conditions.

One of the places this is felt is with combat. The best military for you to field changes based on your economic design (and the Age you have moved into and the National Spirits you have selected). You might be better with more Production to train troops, or more Warfare Domain to support them, or more Wealth to pay the upkeep on expensive elite troops or...

Beyond the economy, combat offers its own interesting decisions. Different types of Units have different capabilities. You design your Armies by assigning multiple Units to fight together, allowing you to create different Army types for different needs.

This is the tip of the iceberg -- Millennia is a huge game. The outline above is an introduction but there is plenty to cover regarding the pillars, plus a substantial number of major systems that haven't even been mentioned.

Over the next few weeks, we will present additional Dev Diaries to showcase more of the game and to dive deeper into specific features. Next up, in two weeks, we'll talk about the building blocks of your nation, Regions, Towns, and Outposts, and also cover a bit of the World Map itself.

We hope you'll check back and join us for more on the game.

And, of course, if this sounds good, please wishlist the game on Steam and join the community.

[crazy canuck]

Humankind already does this.  They are just adding more ages.

[Jacob]

Sounds interesting enough.

Never played Humankind, though. Is it any good?

[Tamas]

Sounds interesting enough.

Never played Humankind, though. Is it any good?

It's a bit quirky but it was worth playing in 1.0 already, and as I understand it has been improved a lot.

[Solmyr]

That first screenshot looks like it's lifted directly from Civ 6. I mean, they didn't even try to make it different in any way.

[Syt]

Isn't that just standard 4X interface elements since Civ 4 or 5?









What I find interesting is that we seem to have more tech areas (see domains in this screenshot):



And "Spartans" then seems to branch into a mini tech tree:



That should make playthroughs a lot more interesting and allow for more build variety.

[Jacob]

I'm not looking for exciting innovations in UX/UI when it comes to 4x games.

I've been playing a bunch of Old World recently, and to me the screenshot looks pretty similar. And I'm okay with that.

[Syt]

Saw this screenshot from combat on Reddit.



I notice it has some similarities to combat in CtP1, with groups of units fighting it out in turns:



CtP1 had the old doomstacks, but units were either melee, ranged, or flankers, and combat would be resolved in turns, so army composition was not entirely unimportant (except in modern era where tanks acted as ranged & flankers IIRC).

I also notice hat each unit has two bars (blue & red) - one for XP, one for HP? There seem to be 15 turns in this combat? At worst it could be something like the combat resolution in Field of Glory: Empires?

I for one am not sad for 4X games moving away from the Panzer General style combat that has been dominating the genre since Civ V.

[Syt]

If they get rid of builder units and instead bring back CtP1's public works budget (you had sliders how much of your gold income would go into research, public works, or treasury) I would be very happy tbh.

[Josephus]

Obviously it is borrowing a lot from Civ and Humankind. The "national spirits" and alternate paths comes directly from Humankind.
I wasn't super thrilled with Humankind. I found it never got quite immersive enough for me. And I think I sucked at it.
So I'm cautiously optimistic, yet excited about this.

[Syt]

RPS has a small preview:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/paradox-are-marching-on-civilization-and-humankind-with-new-4x-millennia

Paradox are marching on Civilization and Humankind with new 4X Millennia
Conquer history, or bend the timeline with its neat Variant Ages

Paradox Interactive and new indie team C-Prompt have announced their debut 4X strategy game Millennia, which I got to play for an hour at this year's Gamescom. With development being led by former Irrational Games co-founder Robert Fermier and Age Of Empires II lead designer Ian M Fischer, Millennia will see you attempting that classic quad of Xs across ten distinct historical ages, starting in the Stone Age before eventually ending up in a "post-modern future", designer Ben Friedman tells me.

The twist here, however, is that you've also got what C-Prompt are calling 'Variant Ages', which let you bend the timeline to your will. Some of these variants are more historical in nature, such as an Age Of Monuments where everyone's building Egyptian pyramids, Friedman explains, while others are more fantastical, with the words steampunk, alchemy and space alien invasions all mentioned in the same sentence. I had a good time with it during my demo, but the real delight was seeing my home army of Kyoto go and invade neighbouring settlement Telford, before going on to conquer Rome - as you do. So if historical melting pots are your kind of 4X jam, read on.

I started my demo in the Age Of Iron, which Friedman tells me is the third historical age in the game. Ordinarily, you'd need to fulfil certain Research criteria before you could move into the next available Age - either a historical one or one of the available Variants - but in my demo, we weren't aiming for one its interesting-sounding Variant Ages. Rather, the objective was to force me into one of Millennia's 'Crisis Ages' instead - with our particular goal here being the Age Of Plague. What fun!

"If you're not paying attention or making bad decisions, some of these crises will come up and you'll be forced to deal with [them]," Friedman says. In this case, my region (and title city) of Kyoto had been neglecting its sanitation for a long time, presumably because we were too busy fending off my hostile Roman and Barbarian neighbours. Alas, I only just about got there by the time by demo ended, so I didn't get to see exactly what effects I'd have to deal with, but other crises include the altogether more apocalyptic-sounding Age Of Floods, he tells me, or the (possibly) more light-hearted sounding Age of Luddites, where technology has been rejected by your people. Thankfully, these Crisis Ages aren't permanent. You can work to get out of them and into a newer, brighter kind of age, and you'll receive several warnings that things are starting to go off the rails long before your crisis kicks off in earnest.

Obviously in single-player mode, you'll only have yourself to blame when you slip into of these disaster periods, but when you're 4X-ing against others, it's a whole different ball game. "When you go into one of these Ages, it sets the timeline for everyone in the game, so the first person to set the Age guides the historical timeline of your game," he says - and that applies to both crises and variant ages.

It's not just these diverging histories that C-Prompt are hoping will set Millennia apart, though. Each civilisation also has a 'National Spirit' to help define their style and personality. Friedman mentions options such as 'German engineering' and 'French cuisine', which are "dynamic choices" you can make at the start of a game. Again, I didn't get to explore these in too much detail during my demo as it was a pre-made scenario, but I'm hopeful they won't run into too many crass stereotypes.

You see, more Spirits will become available as you advance through the Ages, and you can see from the screenshot above that you can have Spartans and Raiders as special warfare units, or Olympians to enhance your diplomacy, for example. Friedman also gives the example that you could be quite traditional and play as the Japanese, who have a samurai unit unlocked from the get-go, or you could, in theory, play as the British instead, and end up getting the samurai later. "It's really up to you on what choices you need to make to win the game, but also what kind of stories you like to tell."

Ultimately, Millennia's main goal seems to be simply being flexible, and letting you drill right down into the details of your civilisation, which I could see quite plainly in how it approached its economy and its supply chains. "In other games, if you build a forester or a wood cutter, you'll just get some production out of that," Friedman continues. "In our game, if you build a wood cutter, you get logs, and logs are worth production, but logs can also be sent to a saw pit, which gets you additional, compounded bonus production on top of that. Or you can send logs off to a paper maker, which gets you paper, which is a kind of intermediary towards getting books, which could be knowledge, or faith-based or administrative documents. Or you could send your logs off to a wood crafter and get arts experience. So lots of our resources have their own personal character to them."

Food, by contrast, is "more linear", but goes deeper in how it's used and produced, echoing the kind of step-by-step processes you might find in something like The Settlers. You have wheat that you can send to the flour mill, which then goes to the bakery and so on. "That allows for a lot of strategic decision making on 'what's the best way to use my terrain?' and 'how can I be flexible when the ages are changing?' and 'what suits my national spirit strategies?'" says Friedman. You'll need to accrue improvement points before you can start constructing these buildings on individual hexes, however, and make sure you've got enough workers to allocate them to each individual job, completing what Friedman calls "the trifecta to getting production out of your region".

The same kind of strategic thinking can be applied to your armies, which move as a single force, but are comprised of individual units you can swap in and out at will, or pull out completely to operate as independent units. In one of my starter armies, for example, I have a non-combatant pioneer in there, who would be put to much better use by sending them off alone to go and create outposts in unclaimed hexes and start expanding my territory in my push north.

When dealing with hostile nations, such as my angry Roman neighbours, fights will mostly take place on open fields, as you'll need to declare war on a nation before stepping inside their claimed hexes. Battles are conducted in rounds, switching to an optional Advance Wars/Wargroove-style screen where units line up on either side of the battlefield and go at each other for three turns. You don't have to sit through these blow-by-blow reproductions of each scrap if you don't want to, though, as various tooltips will flag in advance the likelihood of you winning and losing, and you'll also get a summary at the end of what actually happened in the RNG. Each unit has two bars to keep track of as well: their HP and their morale, the latter of which you can break and force them to retreat, ending the combat scenario early. In these cases, they're forced back a few tiles on the world map, too, allowing you to move into whatever tile they were occupying initially as you chase them down.

Units heal a little bit every turn when they're outside your borders, but they'll replenish their stats much faster inside friendly territory, and I found it was often beneficial to keep a stack of troops sitting inside one of my vassal towns as enemies started pulling menacing faces outside my walls. We'd take the fight to them, and then go back home and heal once they were dealt with. Attacking ends that unit's turn, too, so you'll want to make sure you've moved into a good position before taking an axe to your foe.

Naturally, this being a 4X game, you'll probably want to declare war at some point, which you can do through the diplomacy menu. Unlocking envoys gives you some more interesting options here, such as sending gifts, threatening them or turn minor nations in vassals, for example, but these weren't available in my demo, so I just went ahead and declared full war on Rome. After razing a few of their farms and pestering them with the business end of my warbands' spears, they eventually sued for peace. I could have continued the war if I'd wanted, you know, for full domination, but the longer your warriors spend inside enemy lines, the more unrest you'll have to deal with - which was starting to get quite high in my primary army. Accepting their offer seemed the best option here, and doing so allowed me to claim their city and push them further east.

But what is research and war in a 4X without culture? Friedman describes Millennia's specific Culture powers as "major historical events", and you'll only get to use these once in a while - whenever you fill up your culture bar, effectively. However, play them at the right moment and they could be quite transformative, such as enacting government reforms, creating a new town, or drafting a new army. In my demo, I decided to turn one of the outposts I'd set up with my pioneer into a proper town, allowing me to expand my territory further and start adding more population to it.

In addition to these, you also have Domain powers, which are split into Government, Exploration, Warfare, Engineering and Diplomacy (and later Arts, if you decide to follow that path). Domains sit below Research and Culture on the left side of the screen, and accumulating experience points in these areas grants you special powers you can use to give yourself boosts at opportune moments. Exploration, for example, can be accrued simply by using your scouts to discover landmarks - and when you've got this many disparate nations, cities and cultures all jostling together in one big 4X pot, it means Mount Fuji could technically be sitting right next to The Grand Canyon, say. These meters will tap out when they're full, though, so you're encouraged to make regular use of them compared to Culture.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Millennia's interlocking systems, though, and there's so much more to this game than I could ever hope to cover in a single preview. There are lots more nitty gritty details - or "crunchy strategy" bites, as Friedman likes to call them - to dig into on the road to release, such as its tech trees, unit upgrades, and all the effects of its various Variant and Crisis Ages, and it's great to see another turn-based historical 4X emerge on the scene to rival the juggernauts of Civilization, Humankind, Old World and the like. Millennia is currently slated to arrive on PC in 2024, and I look forward to charting its progress - Variants, Crises and all - in the months ahead.

[Syt]

*trying hard not to get hyped*

[Syt]

Seems they actually have "public work points" to upgrade tiles. Yay! (Around 10:30 or so)

[Josephus]

Took me a while to figure out what he meant by "tick boxes". Then I realized he was saying "tech"