4x games have been around a long time now and the genre has not changed from its core tenets of gameplay. On the surface level, 4x games are great. They give players a fascinating puzzle to solve with layers of mechanics built on top of the 4x design. The problems start showing up when players start digging deeper into the 4x system. I will examine the problems of the 4x system and break them down, looking to build a 4x system that addresses these problems.

Mid to late game transition and the Impact of Decisions

The best part of every 4x game is the first 100 turns of gameplay. The player is constantly making impactful decisions on what technologies,units, and buildings to develop and exploring the area around their developing civilization. Once they reach the mid game, a lot of the momentum of gameplay slows down and turns into economy management as players are unable to continue exploring and expanding and must shift into the exploit and exterminate portion of the game. Decisions become more simplified as the player must choose how they will try and win the game and fully focus on their strategy. At this point surprises no longer happen and players can take all of their known information and find an optimal route to what they need to accomplish. After playing the game enough times players start making the same decisions following the same optimal routes to victory. This makes the later parts of the game feel slow and unexciting. 

Military Mechanics of 4x games

Military is the primary way players have to interact with each other and to gain more resources outside of expanding their borders. Let’s summarize how military mechanics works in 4x games:

• In most 4x games the defender tends to be favored for the majority of the game to give players a chance to set up and respond to threats. Rarely players are close enough to each other to enable a rush strategy of building up military quickly while the other player is focusing on economy. Terrain and distance are major factors that keep the defender at an advantage as they can build units that are able to immediately help fight, while the attacker needs to spend more time to support their units. In Civ 5 and 6 where armies are unstacked(1 unit per tile), terrain heavily disrupts the attacker as it can prevent the aggressor from using their entire force against the defender, giving the defender an even bigger advantage.
• Players planning on military actions usually need to invest heavily into unit technologies and quickly build up and mobilize a force before the defender is aware a war is about to start. If they are able to catch the defender unprepared they will be able to quickly take cities or similar resources. Thus scouting for information is very important (due to fog of war, which restricts how much a player sees). 
• If the aggressor and defender have a similar strength of force, then a war becomes more about attrition than tactics. Whoever has the better economic engine will be at an advantage. 
• 4x games usually have mechanics to keep a war from lasting forever so they generally have a time limit. If a war ends up in a stalemate where neither player is able to wrest resources from each other, then both players suffer economically and can fall behind other players who were not at war as no additional resources were gained.

• The economic upkeep of units tends to have dual effect. The aggressive player will have to invest heavily into using a large army so it prevents the army from getting too large to stop. For the defensive player, having a large standing army is a wasted resource for their economy so they will tend to have a smaller army giving the aggressor an advantage.
• The player with the larger army stack tends to win the fight as they simply have more damage output and health and are able to use it to leverage the win. Tactics and equipment can help even the difference but if both players/forces are equally skilled/equipped then the larger force still wins. 

The Problems with Military in 4x games

Military gameplay in 4x games are a positive feedback loop. The more wars you win where you take resources from the other player, the more you can fund your military and keep building units to win more wars. The opposite is true also, losses in war is likely to cascade into more losses. There are generally no catchup mechanics for an individual player on the losing side of a war.

Theoretically, other players can assist the losing player but the problem is there isn’t really a benefit for doing so. Any assistance is really just taking advantage of a situation where resources are lightly defended from the winning player’s military being focused on the losing player. Civ 6 tries to encourage helping players that are behind with emergencies, where players can join up to assist a player that is behind for some benefit, but usually other players are also simply too far away to help against a military invasion. This problem crops up in most 4x games simply due to distance and opportunity. 

A positive feedback loop isn’t a bad thing, the game must end somehow. The problem is that it generally takes a long time for the win to happen. A player that completely takes over another civilization’s territory gets access to all of its resources, making it unlikely other players will be able to compete unless they are also taking resources in wars or spreading their empire uncontested. With proper optimization, that player can push that advantage into a victory but that could take 4 or more hours of gameplay. That might be the point of 4x games but after several playthroughs players are likely to just stop playing instead of finishing the game. In civ 6 such is the case for a military player in the late game. They need to capture every capital of every civ, but the time and micromanagement of units to achieve this is exhausting and becomes a chore rather than being fun.

In stellaris and Endless legend, they will end the game at an earlier point by looking for the number of territories controlled. This at least solves the issue of a military victory dragging out but doesn’t help with the positive feedback loop that naturally happens when a player gets far enough ahead. It is difficult to interact with players that are ahead and again the game is effectively over before it is over.

The Waiting Game

A portion of 4x games is waiting around for things to happen. There are points in the game where players are not making decisions and simply passing the turn (or fast forwarding in stellaris) with nothing to do. The purpose of the length of a 4x game is to simulate the passing of ages and to let players fully optimize over a long period of time turning their small advantages into larger advantages later in the game. The length also works against them as players will eventually decide what their gameplan is for the rest of the game and focus only on things that pertain to it. A player looking to win through a research victory is going to prioritize building research buildings and choices become very structured at that point. With choices becoming more limited the game shifts back into a waiting around for things to happen.

Recently civ has taken some steps to try and solve this by adding late game effects such as natural disasters and world congress decisions. They have also added an option for randomized tech and civics trees to make the game feel fresher (much like stellaris randomized techs). Even with these additions the game suffers from simply waiting for these interesting things to happen.

Industry is King, Research is Queen

In most 4x games, industry is the best resource a player has available as it reduces the time it takes to make buildings or units. It best enables their economy no matter what victory condition they will pursue as each turn buildings produce resources, the earlier it is active the more resources will be produced. 

Right behind a strong industry is research which enables a player to also build something earlier than other players. When combined, industry and research create an engine that builds everything in time for when research gives you something new to build. The effect can keep chaining together creating a scenario where a player is again not making as many decisions.

Civ 6 has an interesting concept of splitting some of its buildings into a separate “research” tree called the civics tree, which requires culture resources instead of research resources. This helps prevent players from being able to do everything and creates some meaningful decisions in the early and midgame on what that player wants to accomplish. 

Stellaris does away with industry and instead uses time as a resource. Everything has a set amount of time to be built and can only be done faster with special effects or certain techs. With multiple types of other resources players need to choose how much to invest into producing them as the earlier you can build something the sooner you will get it. The resources also generally require other resources to be produced, so players will usually need to evenly build them up rather than a complete focus on one. For ex: you need population to make things which requires food, then to make something it also requires minerals which multiple things use, then to keep them happy and efficient it also requires consumer goods, and then to keep the building functioning it requires energy.

Not all Win Conditions are Equal

Some win conditions take much more effort to complete than others. Generally the win conditions that take longer to complete are less interactive than the other win conditions, giving the other players time to disrupt the win or race against it with another win condition.

Sometimes a win condition is simply worse or incredibly difficult to achieve. For example the religious victory in Civ 6 is near impossible to accomplish against human players, they can declare war against you to wipe out religious units in their territory which can’t fight back. This doesn’t cost them anything to do while the religious player invested heavily into their win condition. Civ is a heavily thematic game that is looking to simulate history, but sometimes the mechanics suffer because of theme and expectation.

Let’s Reinvent the Genre

4x games can learn a lot from recent board game design. Some of the best modern strategy board games have taken everything great about 4x games and compressed it into something people can do within several hours. 

A great example of modern design is Root by leder games. It has asymmetric factions where players are pursuing their own victory condition but every mechanic in the game interacts with other players. Usually the game is very close and all the players have a chance at a victory. Occasionally when a player does get too far ahead the game ends very quickly. The games generally last a little more than an hour.

Twilight Imperium is interesting because there are multiple objectives players need to go for rather than a focused victory condition. Also a military player might have a big fleet but it is only useful for some of the objectives. If they spend the game taking over their neighbors they probably aren’t scoring objectives and are unlikely to win the game despite their greater resources. The amount of actions it takes to build and move fleets is limited every round so players need to use them towards objectives rather than heavily expanding their borders. There is also a focus point for military players in the center of the map encouraging large battles over it because it rewards points outside of objectives. 

The combat system of several games such as Shogun(known as Ikuza now), Axis and Allies, and Twilight Imperium is fairly effective at keeping players that are behind in the game by making the combat more risky and random. Larger forces do have an advantage but it is not guaranteed that they can get away with minimal casualties and occasionally a smaller force can barely come out victorious or force a tactical retreat. 4x games could benefit from a little more randomness in their combat mechanics to help with players that are behind. The combat system in root is very clever, it limits the maximum number of units that can be removed while still incorporating some randomness to ensure that victory isn’t always guaranteed. The advantage of a larger force is mostly for defense as the attacker will need to spend several actions attacking to be able to fully remove it. 

There are systems that exist in games like Lords of Waterdeep that help players catch up from behind. There are actions that provide a great amount of resources to you but also require you to give resources to another player. This encourages you to give those resources to the player that is behind as giving it to a rival that is close in points might push them ahead of you.

Let’s take these concepts and design a new 4x game. Here are our goals:

• Turn Based gameplay to give time for players to make decisions
• Almost every turn the player needs to be making meaningful decisions
• The game length should be short (maybe 2 hours at most)
• The game needs slightly randomized techs (or a limit to techs)
• Military losses are not impossible to come back from
• Players are able to interact with each other despite distance
• Catch up mechanics to keep players invested
• Surprises and events can happen in later stages of the game

The Primary Design:

What if exploration never stopped happening in a 4x game?

Let’s say that at set periods of time(a game round), the game world has a soft reset. What I mean by that is that the game doesn’t fully restart(you keep your resources, techs, units) but the world to explore is hidden and randomized. What kind of design decisions does that entail?

Players would need to be able to make settlements or a way to keep tiles they find despite the soft reset. Perhaps they own the tile no matter where it is placed on the randomization and it is revealed to them. 

With owned tiles players need a way to protect them but if they are randomly placed far away how do players reach it? We could have a teleport mechanic that teleports units from your capital to that tile. This also solves the problem of not being able to reach other players due to distance as the owned tiles could happen to be placed near them.

If we are not restricting distance between players then we need to make sure a player can react in time to deal with potential sneak attacks from a teleported army. The teleport should take some time to do and give off a signal that someone is teleporting there.

How do we tackle the positive feedback loop problem? We want to encourage fights over objectives rather than fights over resources. Keeping the game shorter ensures that players that focus only on fighting over resources might not have enough time to catch up on objectives. Objectives need to be valuable to players that are pursuing different plans. We definitely want a central location that all players want to fight over at some point. It could give out a bonus that changes with each reset, so a different player might want it that round instead and whoever had it previously might not benefit from it so they will focus on something else. There should be other objectives scattered around the map in predetermined locations to keep it fair between the players and to always have something for players to go for. Decisions are starting to take shape as “do I try for one of these multiple objectives this round or do I try to get more resources?”

Battles definitely need some randomness but players need to be able to influence them and gain an advantage somehow to keep the game moving forward. They also need to not be a complete loss for the loser of the battle. Perhaps units are only allowed to fight for x amount of rounds or an army automatically retreats when half of its forces are killed and can’t be attacked again that turn. Retreats can also be allowed before then to give the losing player an out before they lose too much. For advantages players can build units to soft counter other units and research techs and build buildings, possibly even take other actions like spending resources that temporarily buff their units. The advantages cannot be overwhelmingly powerful though, absolute victory should not be guaranteed if players have a few more advantages than other players.

I think we have enough initial design to pick a theme for the game. Fantasy fits well with having the world reset, perhaps a lich cursed the world so that it reforms the way it does. The goal of the players is to stop the world from reforming as the cycle is strenuous on society. The objectives should thematically work towards this goal. Perhaps with a fantasy setting we can introduce heroes into the game. They are the primary figures that drive forth the narrative of saving the world and opens up options for exploration and faction identity. Let’s start building a mechanical identity for the game. I’ll put it in a google document to keep it organized

https://docs.google.com/document/d/16sjK-bsNKL_AvDtFXV-Xp8p3sZyh8FQ2qXvFYuO5nzg/edit?usp=sharing