4X games have a lot of colonial ideology just kind of baked in.

July 29, 2023 5:47 AM

Can you make an anti-imperial empire game? [Eurogamer] The 4Xperts behind Civilization, Syphilisation and Victoria 3 discuss eXperimental 4X design.

“4X games may sound incredibly reductive on the surface. After all, this is the only genre of game whose name is also a decree about how you should play - eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate. But as any fan will tell you, 4X games are actually bustling sandboxes that can be tackled in all kinds of ways. For some players, that could mean eschewing military action or research or trying to make do with a single settlement. For others, it could mean trying to rewrite the historical events depicted - whether out of mischief, or in an effort to challenge narratives about the past that loom large in present-day politics.

Some 4X games lean into this spirit of eXperimentation. Take Syphilisation from Indian developer Nikhil Murthy, a "post-colonial 4X" and intricate parody of Civilization, centring on colonial India during the time of the British Raj. The game includes familiar 4X concepts and systems, but attempts to reframe "human struggle as a common striving for a better world rather than a competition between ourselves", though whether this ideal comes to fruition is up to the player. Rather than a government or ruler, the game casts you as one member of a group of research students, who put together their own interpretations of figures like Gandhi and Churchill while moving units and building cities.

I'm fascinated by Syphilisation, and got chatting with Nikhil on Twitter earlier this year. In one of those magical opportunities, it turns out he's friends with Ryan Sumo, a prominent member of the Philippine gamedev scene and developer of cute-but-cutthroat election sim Political Animals, who is nowadays a business owner for Europa Universalis IV and Victoria 3 at grand strategy household Paradox Interactive. Ryan, it transpires, is friends with Firaxis veteran Jon Shafer, designer of Civilization IV: Warlords and Beyond The Sword, and lead designer of Civilization V. We all got together one very nerdy Friday afternoon to discuss uninvestigated possibilities in collaboration systems and map design, and how this most imperial of genres can shapeshift in the hands of players and developers from former colonies.”

posted by Fizz (32 comments total)

Interesting stuff.

When I first played Civilization, I didn't try to attack anyone. I was much more excited about building my city and gaining resources. When I was eventually attacked, thr city was MUCH stronger than the enemies.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:37 AM on July 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

When I first played Civilization, I didn't try to attack anyone. I was much more excited about building my city and gaining resources. When I was eventually attacked, thr city was MUCH stronger than the enemies.

Back when I played a lot of 4X games, that was usually how I played. Science and tech and culture and economy, and just enough military to defend against attacks. I hated managing massive stacks of units, so managing the cities was preferable. Kudos for Call to Power for allowing units to be stacked into armies and CivV for limiting the number of units, but I still prefer the more building aspect then the blowing stuff up aspect. And a special shout-out to SMAC/SMACX for having different factions that played completely differently so you could choose a faction that suited your play style.
posted by Clever User Name at 7:47 AM on July 29, 2023 [11 favorites]

So given that my game is [presented as] a research group report, I have pollution be a metaphor for people getting fed up with everybody else in the group. So there's a lot of back and forth that you can do as you get closer to others in the group, you get healthier about your own work ethics, and you're polluting less.

In FreeCiv, the free Civ 2 clone, I found a way to use the built-in pollution mechanic to give myself a big advantage: Build all my cities on hills (or convert them to hills later on), make sure all my cities had harbours and offshore platforms, and then pollute as much as possible. Rising sea levels would then benefit me and mess badly with all the other civilizations.

Which I guess is to say that in the hands of a committed-enough psychopath...
posted by clawsoon at 7:53 AM on July 29, 2023 [25 favorites]

Rising sea levels would then benefit me and mess badly with all the other civilizations.

Ah, the Lex Luthor strategy. A favorite of the discerning supervillain!
posted by notoriety public at 8:32 AM on July 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

Rising sea levels would then benefit me and mess badly with all the other civilizations.

In Alpha Centauri (an offshoot of the Civ series) you could use terraformers to sink enemy cities, and I think it wouldn’t even count as an act of war.
posted by Etrigan at 8:33 AM on July 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

[...] make sure all my cities had harbours and offshore platforms, and then pollute as much as possible. Rising sea levels would then benefit me and mess badly with all the other civilizations.

A strategy I've also used In SMACX. Very effective if you play the pirate faction who gets free pressure domes in every colony and bonuses to marine resources. Everyone else is drowning as their unprotected cities flood while you're living the high life on the sea. The only downside is Planet hates you for the pollution, so mindworm attacks are very common.
posted by Clever User Name at 8:35 AM on July 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

This sounds so great, and so long overdue. I hope it kicks off a new kind of subversion of the genre. I've had a lot of fun playing 4X games in the past, but while I usually wind up pushing back against Intended Game Design, I inevitably end up doing war crimes. It's just kind of baked-in.

I love the sandbox nature of them and the way you feel like just another background participant in these games, and often I choose to play "tall" (i.e. small but highly developed) rather than "wide" (sprawling and world-conquering). In a way, I feel that the players bent on domination wind up getting their just desserts in the form of tedious micromanagement anyway.

While I have fond memories of holding off the combined forces of the Pope and his minions as a filthy heretic (Crusader Kings), destroying the invading Europeans as Aztecs or Cherokee with firearms (Europa Universalis), and creating a pan-galactic inter-species cyborg-lovefest (Stellaris), I feel less and less inclined to play these kinds of games for all the reasons mentioned. But it would be a shame to seem them consigned to the dustbin of videogame history. There's nothing quite like some unexpected event or circumstance arising and just being there to see it play out. I hope Paradox and the others are paying attention.
posted by Acey at 8:37 AM on July 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

This is somewhat off topic, because it is a board game and not a 4X game, but one of my favorite anti-imperialist board games is Spirit Island,, where you play the literal spirits of the island fighting against colonizers. It's a wonderful collaborative game that does have a bit of a learning curve but it is worth it.
posted by canine epigram at 8:49 AM on July 29, 2023 [14 favorites]

Now that I think about it, it was a post on this very website back in 2013 that got me into all this. (I had played Civ for years before that, but back then we called it "strategy", not 4X). Several thousand hours and one decade later, I still get a kick out of "emergent gameplay", and reading the conversation, it seems they are leaning into it more. When I have a new computer I look forward to giving my support to more creators like Nikhil rather than the Microsoft-Activision-Blizzards of this world.
posted by Acey at 8:53 AM on July 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Previously on the green, following a related thread about board games on the blue.
posted by automatronic at 9:02 AM on July 29, 2023

Whenever I play Civilization VI, I almost always turn off "Domination" wins. I think it is far more interesting and fun to win by way of Culture, Science, Faith, or Diplomacy.
posted by Fizz at 10:01 AM on July 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

This is somewhat off topic, because it is a board game and not a 4X game, but one of my favorite anti-imperialist board games is Spirit Island,, where you play the literal spirits of the island fighting against colonizers. It's a wonderful collaborative game that does have a bit of a learning curve but it is worth it.

Spirit Island is freaking amazing. I do sometimes wonder if it's a bit "noble savage" in its framing, but I think I'm overthinking it. (I suppose we'll see in the forthcoming Dahan expansion -- for context, the Dahan are the indigenous people of the island and in the base game and existing expansions they help you kill off invaders and you generally want to stop them being killed, but they don't really have backstory.)
posted by hoyland at 10:37 AM on July 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

A thing I like about Spirit Island is that as the spirits you aren’t exactly on the Dahan’s side either. They are better as you can live in balance, but some Spirits help them and others are a threat to the Dahan as well. So the Dahan don’t get that noble savages feel for me.
posted by meinvt at 11:03 AM on July 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

I could never bring myself to play Colonization as a conqueror and tried to have good relations with my neighbours. But even that builds on the lie that the settlers were just taking otherwise unclaimed land. Europa Universalis makes the explicit point that even if you try to colonize land not taken by one of the playable American or African nations, there are still people in those areas that have to be subjugated. Sure you could cherry pick the regions that are empty or have low "aggression" but that puts you behind the other major powers in a game where growth equals victory.

Space 4X games tend to avoid this entirely - space starts out empty, and you and your competitors all start on relatively equal footing, much like at the beginning of Civ. Stellaris does drop in some pre-spacefaring civilizations you can come across, but much like the rest of that game, the mechanics are amoral and therefor immoral in that you can subjugate, enslave, or exterminate as long as you're playing the type of civilization that is okay with that. You can eventually do things like outlaw slavery, but the follow-up can be total war and extermination of the slavers.
posted by thecjm at 12:08 PM on July 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Does anyone know whether Syphilisation runs well under Wine? I’ve been looking for a new game in this genre which runs on macOS.
posted by adamsc at 12:59 PM on July 29, 2023

I almost always win Civ 6 with a Science or Diplomacy victory, but a couple of those Diplo victories have been truly Machiavellian. The best/worst was when I played as Australia, which benefits from having war declared on it and from freeing other people’s cities. My continent had a much weaker civ located between me and Rome, so I made a military alliance with the other civ and then repeatedly provoked Rome into war against us both, after which Rome would steamroll my ally and I’d leap to the rescue. It worked fabulously well. I felt so dirty.
posted by showbiz_liz at 1:11 PM on July 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

Your primary goal in Spirit Island is to destroy as many towns and cities as possible often in ways that wouldn't leave much of a chance for their populations. The cover of the Horizons of Spirit Island box makes it clear that it's not just soldiers either but families.
posted by donio at 1:20 PM on July 29, 2023

Whenever I play Civilization VI, I almost always turn off "Domination" wins.

Even if you turn Domination off, it's hard to avoid the fact that taking opponent cities snowballs into whatever flavor of victory you wish, and its almost universally impossible to to this without war. eXterminate is basically omnipresent in the game.

Alternative 4x adjacent approaches I've seen:

Offworld Trading Company is a real time strategy game, and it retains the 4x core "colonize a place" theme, but direct violence is entirely removed as an option. You manage a company, and the goal is instead to buy out the competitors, before they can do the same and fire you. Direct attack is off limits, instead you engage in sabotage and fight off pirates. Like M.U.L.E., land is made available through claim auctions. The other method of interaction is real time commodities exchange: dumping aluminum on the market drives prices down for all, and buying local steel supplies to construct your buildings will drive it up. Single player mode allows pausing, so you can inspect the situation and contemplate your bids, and orders.

Concordia is a board game where you expand Roman era a trading empire and parlay that into gifts to the temples (points). Exploration is missing as the map is fully known at the start (but randomized!). Expansion is critical -- your population of colonists acts as a multiplier for building more trade houses, and more trade houses means more resources. Beyond that loop, resources give you limited ability to tech up through buying cards but power levels are more or less static. True to its name, there is no player elimination or direct conflict; expanding into a new city just means the next person to expand in will have to pay more do to so. The most you can do is block a trade route by occupying it with your own colonist, or buy the card someone else wanted.

Pax Pamir is a board game where as a local Afghani leader your goal is to exploit or at least survive repeated waves of colonization attempts from Russia and Britain. Exploration is missing, with a static map serving as a battleground for Great Power's escalating conflicts. Expansion is rapid at the beginning of the game, but is paired with crisis points that are the only source of VP and can clear the board of all foreign militias. Tech is static for the duration and while efficiency is present, it's less important than having the ability to do a thing at when a crisis point appears. No player elimination but you can directly attack anyone not aligned with your chosen faction, and always assassinate court members. The result is dramatic political upheavals, all driven by circumstances imposed on you from outside. You may end up betraying the Afghani restoration faction and handing over a key general from your own court to the Brits, just to curry favor because they're likely to win the war and reward you when they do.
posted by pwnguin at 1:36 PM on July 29, 2023 [10 favorites]

Stellaris is an interesting one. It's kind of set up so that you can role play anything from completely monstrous space fascists or universe devouring hive mind swarm to peaceful federation or collective machine intelligence pondering the secrets of the universe. So in that way it's really quite amoral.

But then again, certain ways of being in the game world seem to be way harder than others. For example, you can have slaves - but it's because you're role playing being evil, not because it's a great idea. I never, ever seem to have enough educated, specialist people in my empire in my games. There's no reason I wouldn't want to give most people more food and consumer goods in exchange for more technology and alloys.

And having free migration treaties with a bunch of people is so incredibly good early on. most species will be adapted to only a handful of the planets you encounter, so until you get terraforming technology and a massive economy, mos planets will be near useless to your species. So it is incredibly powerful to just be able to load up a colony ship with people who actually *want* to live on a planet in your empire's borders and get it up and running without hassle and expense.

On one hand, the game seems amoral to immoral, with the ability to gleefully commit atrocities with relatively little pushback. On the other hand/tentacle/grasping appendage, there is never any real resource shortages for the basics of life, or conflicts between different species inside a polity, so there every reason to want everybody to come to your empire to be happy and productive and well taken care of. Being a jerk to the population rather than just being a jerk to other empires seems entirely counterproductive.
posted by Zalzidrax at 1:37 PM on July 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

I kinda wish Shafer would’ve had more to say about the original Sid Meier’s Civilization, because I think it’s much more interesting from the perspective of post-colonialism than its sequels.

My personal hobbyhorse with the first Civ is that it’s essentially a game about global nuclear annihilation, and that everything else about that game leads players to the choice of either winning by escaping planet Earth and settling Alpha Centauri, or destroying every other civilization, and most of yours, in a thermonuclear conflagration.

I’ve thought about the Civ endgame a lot through the years. On some level it’s almost a simple parable, if mankind doesn’t strive for the stars, it will destroy its home. But the other way to look at it is that Sid Meier saw technology as an out of control process that could either be diverted off-planet, or it would destroy the Earth.

The thing that fucks the planet up is simply pollution, and it’s entirely the result of either technological disaster (nuclear fallout), poor urban planning (not developing mass transit) or producing too much stuff (regular pollution). Eventually that leads to global warming and Earth rapidly becomes less and less habitable.

This is seemingly baked into the game, because if you keep playing into the future, eventually there will be runaway global warming, whatever the player tries to do.

So really, the parable of Sid Meier’s Civilization is that technology will inevitably lead to our home becoming uninhabitable, and so our only shot is to go to another planet, and presumably repeat the process there.

It’s the bleakest goddamn game I know of, because it essentially says that humanity is irredeemable, that we’re hardwired to explore, expand, exploit and exterminate, and will destroy Earth in the process, and whichever other planet we can reach.

Later games in the series allowed players to win through diplomacy and culture and what have you, but the first one said that technology has put us on the road to perdition, and that the best we can hope for is to delay our self-destruction.
posted by Kattullus at 6:03 PM on July 29, 2023 [20 favorites]

Oops, I just realized I left out the Nikhil Murthy quote that my comment was a response to. So pretend that my comment starts with the following:

“But a common criticism of Civilization is that you can be anyone you want to be, as long as it's America. […] Like yes, you're making Civilization, so you do have to end up being America. That's just the nature of the material conditions of making a game like Civilization, right?”
posted by Kattullus at 6:14 PM on July 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Non-competitive games fascinate me.

A dear friend who was a games consultant used to advocate for these. His slogan: "I'm less competitive than you are!"
posted by doctornemo at 6:39 PM on July 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

eXterminate is basically omnipresent in the game.

That's been my complaint about many 4X games, and which is why I was excited for Humankind. A pity they dropped the ball on many aspects of the game, it looked very promising, and I'm hoping that it will eventually be good.

Anyway, the way Humankind approaches it, is that culture evolves over time as you pass through different eras. You win through collecting "fame" so it is not the end-point of the game that matters, but the collective influence your civilization has had upon the history of civilization. For example, the United States is undoubtedly the most powerful nation today, but if you fast forward 1000 years and ask historians whether the Roman Empire, or the United States had more influence on human civilization and history, it wouldn't be a sure thing that the US would "win".

There are basically no militaristic contemporary cultures - sure, in the older times, nations could gain fame by defeating and subjugating their enemies. At best there are two expansionist empires - the Soviets and the Americans - they want to expand their territory and influence, but not necessarily through direct war. (Eg Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014)
posted by xdvesper at 6:53 PM on July 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Kattullus, to be fair, Civ I ended in 2050.

You can choose to play beyond the end of the game, when a victor is chosen, regardless of the victory method, so long as you aren't wiped out.

It is true that if you play beyond the time victory the game stops having more technologies and you dead end into a global warming total destruction. But you literally already won the game and are playing outside of the defined game parameters at that point.
posted by NotAYakk at 7:44 PM on July 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

it's not just soldiers either but families

Maybe next time they'll leave their families at home instead of using them as human shields, hmmmmmmmmm?
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:48 AM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

So this got me thinking about Alpha Centauri. Narratively, SMAC is at a minimum a twist on the colonial narrative: Obviously you come to settle, but when you arrive there's no intelligent native life and all the conflict is with the other human factions, split by ideology.

Meanwhile the planet's life becomes increasingly aggressive, and the arc of the game (in terms of technology and little text narratives) is learning to interact with the planet and understand its unique and developing intelligence. Anyone trying to dominate the planet is objectively wrong, even in practical terms. You can beat the other factions but not the planet; there's no ending that makes it safe for bipedal-settler-humans.

The thing is, it doesn't feel at all like it's subverting the genre. (And that wasn't the intent, either.) In gameplay terms, it's very close to Civ II and on top of that, this is one of the war gamiest of the Civ clones. I think it does show the limits of what you can accomplish with just flavor changes.
posted by mark k at 10:23 AM on July 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

So really, the parable of Sid Meier’s Civilization is that technology will inevitably lead to our home becoming uninhabitable, and so our only shot is to go to another planet, and presumably repeat the process there.

As Civ has evolved, though, the game really doesn't work that way anymore. In the latest iteration, you can build carbon-capture once you have the right tech. There's a bad spot where the sea levels often begin to rise before you can start cancelling out CO2, but you can absolutely reverse the whole process. Sort of a The Peripheral style Jackpot and recovery, if you can call what happens in The Peripheral "recovery".
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 12:39 PM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

It doesn't need to hang on global warming. Regardless of what we do, the sun is going is going to push the habitable zone out past us. Earth is doomed one way or another.

Unless we figure out how to bring it with us or turn it into a pilotable spaceship (but that's a different kind of game).

I would really enjoy being able to take a kind of benevolent empire spreading self determination, offering resources, technology or whatever other help, military defense, but protected and celebrated cultural traditions.

There is a mechanic in the Total War: War Hammer games if you're playing as the vampires where you corrupt neighboring provinces and sometimes they spontaneously join you but because you're nice instead of vampires. Those games are also nice because even the "good guy" factions are a-holes so it's really all bad guys all the way down. It's nice to embrace your dark side and do virtual evil sometimes.
posted by VTX at 2:47 PM on July 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Terra nil is another interesting anti-growth game in this space, it takes place after a civilisation has moved on and you need to recycle and rewild the land
posted by orta at 1:06 AM on July 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've played every version of Civilization except the very first and more recently got into the Paradox Crusader Kings/EU4/Victoria3 series, so I find the design of these games and the way they incentivize or disincentivize different behaviors pretty interesting. I was pleased at how more recent versions of Civ added victory conditions beyond world conquest (boring!) and winning the space race. The Paradox games will sometimes offer both a diplomatic and a military approach to an event or goal, both equally valid, and disincentivize unchecked growth both explicitly in the mechanics of the game (measures of governing capacity and overextension, resource depletion, rebellion against oppressive treatment) and indirectly in making the UX of managing all those provinces/military units/etc really annoying for the player past a certain point. I often find the games end up in an equilibrium state where you have expanded "enough" and can focus more on your internal development.

In all of these games you're often guided over time, at least to some extent, towards policies that reflect development of representative government, investment in education and standards of living, getting away from polluting technologies, and so on. Of course, you can also learn that being a cultural genocidaire, or a religious zealot banding together with other zealots in holy war, is extremely powerful. While in real life I'm deeply wary of autocracies and the coercive power of the State, in-game I'll happily act as an iron-fisted dictator. It's a really efficient way to get stuff done! And in all cases you generally have to carve out at least some space by expansion and conquest, lest you get absorbed by your more rapacious neighbors.

For games like EU4 or Victoria3, which are nominally anchored in a real historic period, one can absolutely take issue with the way colonial institutions are depicted (like colonies in Victoria3 achieving quite elevated standards of living which is, uh, not how that worked). As a player you can definitely get outcomes where the historic colonial powers don't "win" and hegemonies don't develop to the same extent. But colonization and empire-building remain important features of the eras being depicted. For Civilization, likewise, I think it's hard to get away completely from violent conquest and competition for resources—like it or not, people have done a lot of that over the course of history.

For games that are less tied to real human history there's certainly a wider range of possibilities, and you can really get into modeling states/cultures that are pacifist, environmentalist, multicultural, etc. But if it's going to be a 4X game at all I think you have to allow for the possibility that other actors in the game will not behave the same way and will be favoring conquest/growth/exploitation. Otherwise it's not a 4X game, it's something else.
posted by 4rtemis at 11:25 AM on July 31, 2023

>> You can beat the other factions but not the planet; there's no ending that makes it safe for bipedal-settler-humans.

Take heart fellow Spartan, everything you need for victory can be found in the teachings of Col. Corazon Santiago's "Planet: A Survivalist's Guide".
posted by Molesome at 7:09 AM on August 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

At best there are two expansionist empires - the Soviets and the Americans

The PRC is at the very least winding up to this status.
posted by jaduncan at 11:46 AM on August 2, 2023